Mazda

1920 – 1927

A cork factory in Hiroshima

Mazda began in 1920 in Hiroshima as Toyo Cork Kogyo, a cork manufacturer. The firm was ailing, and in 1921 Jujiro Matsuda took charge, developing compressed cork board and getting production on track.

Matsuda was born in Hiroshima in 1875, the youngest of 12 children. He left for Osaka at 13 to work with a blacksmith, and at 31 he set up his own workshop in a rented cowshed and went on to introduce the Matsuda Pump.

In 1925 a fire destroyed much of the cork factory. Matsuda decided to return to the machine industry, which he knew best, and in 1927 the company dropped the word cork from its name and became Toyo Kogyo.

1945 – 1960

Rebuilding, then a first car

Hiroshima was devastated by the atomic bomb in 1945, but Toyo Kogyo's facilities suffered only minimal damage. Mazda says the company worked to resume production while helping the city's recovery, giving relief to victims and letting government offices operate from its premises. Its Australian site adds that assembly restarted within four months.

In 1950 Mazda began selling the Type-CA one-tonne truck, powered by a 1,157 cc engine. From there it went on to build passenger vehicles, and in 1960 the R360 Coupe, Mazda's very first passenger vehicle, rolled off the assembly line.

1983 – 2016

Horse and rider as one

Mazda began deliberating on a lightweight sports car in 1983 and unveiled the MX-5 Miata at the Chicago show in February 1989. Mass production started at Ujina Plant No. 1 in Hiroshima that April.

Its guiding idea has a name: jinba ittai, horse and rider as one. Mazda's Australian site says the phrase was first coined during the MX-5's development and has applied to every Mazda model since.

On 22 April 2016 Mazda built its one-millionth MX-5, a milestone it put down to the strong support of fans around the world. Mazda said then that the car had held the Guinness World Record for the best-selling open-top two-seater sports car for many years.

1959 – today

Mazda in Australia

Among Australia's ten best-selling brands, Mazda is the only one that started here with a three-wheeler, CarExpert noted in 2025: the T600 truck, first imported in 1959. By the late 1960s it was selling more than 10,000 vehicles a year.

The rotary found a market too. In 1973 Mazda sold 6,218 rotary-powered vehicles in Australia, according to a WhichCar retrospective, and a Capella RE won its class at Bathurst that year. In 1995 Dick Johnson and John Bowe won the last 12-hour race at Eastern Creek in the RX-7 SP, which Mazda Australia developed locally.

Mazda Australia opened a purpose-built national headquarters in Mulgrave, in Melbourne's south-east, in 2016. The CX-5, launched in 2012, was Australia's favourite mid-size SUV for seven years running, and Mazda Australia says more than 330,000 CX-5s have called Australia home.