Six decades after setting off from Japan on a 246cc Yamaha, Shigeru “Stan” Yoshida is back on the road at 84, proving that some journeys are less about distance than a lifetime spent refusing to stop.
Long before motorcycle travel became television spectacle, before Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman turned the “Long Way” idea into a global franchise, Shigeru “Stan” Yoshida had already done the hard version. In 1965, the young Japanese rider was not a celebrity, had no production crew and no chase vehicles. He was a 22-year-old university graduate with a plan, a letter and enough nerve to write directly to Yamaha Motor president Genichi Kawakami asking for a motorcycle to ride around the world. Yamaha said yes. Kawakami supplied him with a new Yamaha YDS-3, a 246cc two-stroke twin, along with spare parts for the journey.
Yoshida had not arrived at the idea casually. His own later account says the dream began in school, when he wanted to see the wider world, meet people beyond Japan and test whether a Japanese motorcycle could survive the worst roads and climates on earth. He had already done a 16,622-kilometre trial run around Japan on an older Yamaha YD-II, learning that a motorcycle offered the mobility and independence he needed. By the time he approached Yamaha, he had spent years researching climate, borders, visas, road conditions and shipping routes.
He left Japan in July 1965. What followed was a journey of almost mythic scale for the era: roughly two years and eight months, 63 countries, five continents and about 135,000 to 136,000 kilometres, depending on the source. Overland Magazine records the ride as 85,000 miles, or 136,000 kilometres, across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
The route reads today like a roll call of overland impossibility. Yoshida shipped from Japan to North America, rode through Canada, the United States, Mexico and Central America, then continued through South America. From Brazil he crossed the Atlantic to Europe, moved through Western and Eastern Europe, entered North Africa and the Middle East, continued across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, then through Southeast Asia to Singapore. From there he shipped to Perth, crossed Australia and returned to Japan.
It was not a glossy adventure. His YDS-3 carried about 70 kilograms of gear, including camping equipment, medicines, dictionaries, formal clothes, tools and enough spare parts to keep a small workshop busy. In South America, Brazil’s heat and rough roads punished both man and machine. Yamaha’s later technical review noted that over the journey the bike consumed 7,445 litres of petrol, 260 litres of oil, 16 tyres, 68 spark plugs, 10 drive chains and four clutch sets. By the end, after more than 130,000 kilometres, the YDS-3 was exhausted, but it had proved its point.
When Yoshida returned to Japan in 1968, he was received as a hero and accepted a job with Yamaha. His journey had become not only a personal achievement, but also a rolling demonstration of Japanese engineering at a time when Yamaha and other Japanese brands were asserting themselves on the world stage.
But one part of the world still nagged at him. In 1967, during his first journey, Yoshida had tried to enter the Soviet Union from Finland and had been refused. The unfinished road stayed with him for decades. In 2002, shortly after retiring from Yamaha at 60, he set out again, this time on a Yamaha Royal Star. He crossed Russia via Siberia, rode west through Europe and then across North America, completing a second circumnavigation of the globe. Yamaha’s technical review records that the 2002 trip covered about 29,038 kilometres through 13 countries over roughly four months.
His Yamaha career had by then come full circle. Yoshida spent his final working years helping establish and operate Yamaha’s Communication Plaza in Iwata, later serving as director and curator of its motorcycle collection. A 1998 Yamaha News issue introduced the Communication Plaza as a new facility for exploring Yamaha’s past, present and future, while later accounts identify Yoshida as its inaugural director and museum curator.
Most riders would have called that enough. Yoshida did not. In 2026, at 84, he began preparing for a third around-the-world ride. Good Loop’s Yoshida archive reported that he had originally planned to depart in 2025, but delayed the journey after a serious illness and resumed only after receiving his doctor’s approval. His latest machine is again modest by adventure-touring standards: a Yamaha DragStar 250, a small V-twin cruiser.
The plan was to start from the end of Route 66 in Santa Monica, ride through North and South America, then continue to Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia and eventually home to Japan. On March 13, 2026, Yoshida shipped the DragStar from Yokohama. By April he was in Los Angeles waiting for the bike. On April 25, he set off from Brea in Orange County.
His U.S. ride then carried him from Southern California to Texas and east to Alabama, where he stopped at the Barber Vintage Motorcycle Museum. There, he was invited to sign one of the museum’s concrete supports, joining a tradition that includes racers and motorcycle celebrities. In a neat twist of history, Kenny Roberts, the first American to win the 500cc Grand Prix world championship on a Yamaha, was also at Barber. Yoshida had seen Roberts race many times, but had never met him.
That is what Stan Yoshida is doing now: riding again, not as a nostalgia act, but as the same restless traveller who left Japan in 1965 to measure the earth by motorcycle. His latest ride is framed as his final long-distance tour. “I want to go as far as I possibly can,” he told the Atami Shimbun before departure. At 84, on a 250cc Yamaha, he is still proving that the real long way round is not a television series. It is a lifetime.
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