Onitsuka Tiger: how Bruce Lee and actress Uma Thurman helped Japanese sports shoe brand become a global fashion must-have

Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places. Take the curious case of Kihachiro Onitsuka.

One hot evening in the summer of 1951, Onitsuka was enjoying a salad of pickled cucumber and cold octopus. It is very possible he was pondering the future of a company that he had set up two years previously, but which was struggling.

Born in 1918 in Japan’s Tottori prefecture, Onitsuka had fought in the World War II and, in 1949, set up a firm that made shoes for youngsters. In later interviews he always said that he wanted to raise the spirit and morale of young Japanese people in those difficult days immediately after the war. He believed that the best way of achieving that would be by promoting healthy lifestyles through sport.

With Japan still under occupation and American sports gaining traction – particularly basketball, which was appealing to many youngsters because it required little in the way of expensive equipment – he had his heart set on getting a foot in the door of the basketball shoe market. Onitsuka’s primary motivation for developing basketball shoes, he always said, was that they are the most difficult to create.

Onitsuka’s earliest attempts to devise a new and effective shoe flopped. But they did demonstrate that basketball players needed to be able to stop in a heartbeat, be in motion again just as quickly and be able to turn on the proverbial dime. And no basketball shoes that were available at the time gave athletes those advantages.

More attempts to create shoes for basketball players came to nothing, until that fateful evening when he sat down to his octopus salad and realised that the suckers on the octopus legs gave the creature a strong grip.