Legend 09: Design illustrates culture, Shozo Sato

Imitatio Cecili was the author of a popular monthly column called “Reports on Vintage Cars” that appeared in Car Graphic magazine during the 1960s and introduced cars of the 1920s with beautiful watercolour illustrations. In fact, however, Cecili was the pen name of Shozo Sato, who had to write under a pseudonym because he had recently been an employee of Nissan Motor, where he had served as the head of the Design Department.

‘His design sketches were all done in watercolours and every one of them was just amazing. You could see the multiple facets of the structure in three dimensions,’ recalled Isao Sano, whom we interviewed to ask about Sato.

Sano was born in Tokyo in May 1932 and joined Nissan Motor in 1955 upon graduating from the Tokyo University of the Arts. He met Shozo Sato for the first time when he was still a university student.

‘In 1955, it was unusually difficult to get a job. This was the so-called employment ice age in Japan and most companies were not hiring new graduates. However, Nissan needed to add two people and I was one of them. Mr Sato took the trouble to travel all the way to my university in Ueno, Tokyo, to see me,’ he said, remembering his first impression of Shozo Sato.

‘I was interested in designing ships at the time and had worked as a trainee at Mitsubishi Shipyard during my third year at university. One of my university instructors recommended me to Mr Sato, because he knew that I had often said I wanted to design ships and he thought that working at a carmaker would be acceptable for me because both ships and cars were things that moved. I remember explaining to Mr. Sato about my drawings even though I can’t recall just what they were. I went through a couple of interviews with Nissan and then received an offer letter. After that Mr Sato contacted me and asked me to start at the company right away. So I was working there about once a week before I officially joined the company.’

In a company that manufactured cars and tended to focus on features and performance, Shozo Sato often demonstrated his anger with people outside his section when it came to the subject of making cars.

‘He was a heavy smoker and there were stacks of empty cigarette boxes on his desk. And he looked so cool with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth,’ Sano laughed. ‘He also loved smoking a pipe. One day Mr Sato returned to his desk from the regular meeting of department and section heads in a bad mood and we figured that things must have gone badly at the meeting. He said that he’d been clenching his fists so tightly that he thought his fingernails would be drawing blood from his palms and because he was caught up in his emotions, he stuffed too much tobacco into his pipe, so it wouldn’t light. I think that he must have been speaking out for what he believed in at those meetings, so that the Design Department could do the job right and so that the right work would be approved as such.’

Shozo Sato might have had a very strong will, but in fact he was not so strong physically and he was forced to take sick leave more than once.

‘Even when he stayed home for health reasons, he was always thinking about work. At one point in time he lived in the Ofuna area in Kanagawa Prefecture and there was a Nissan chassis designer who lived in the same neighbourhood. When Mr Sato was home sick, almost every day he would write a memo about work, jotting down his thoughts, and give it to this designer to deliver to us. We would read it, work out our response, and then go see him at his house right away. But before we actually went up and knocked on his door, we’d go into a coffee shop and have an ad hoc strategy meeting, saying things like “We should talk about good things first, so he’ll think we’re doing a good job,” and “Let’s leave the bad news that might make him scold us until later” (laughter). We called this “the Ofuna courier run”.’