Kihachiro Onitsuka

Born in Tottori Prefecture in 1918, Kihachiro Onitsuka founded Onitsuka Shokai in Kobe in 1949 to make basketball shoes for postwar Japanese youth, a project he expanded into a full athletic footwear company. His designs introduced the suction-cup sole and the Mexico 66 silhouette, the latter created for the 1968 Mexico Olympics and bearing the now-iconic crossed stripes. In 1977 Onitsuka Tiger merged with GTO and JELENK to form Asics, an acronym for the Latin anima sana in corpore sano; the Onitsuka Tiger name was later revived in 2002 as a heritage lifestyle line. He led Asics for decades and is remembered as the founding figure of modern Japanese athletic footwear.