It’s the morning of August 6th, 1945. Jujiro Matsuda is heading back home after visiting his company headquarters in nearby Hiroshima, where his small trucks called Mazdas have become fixtures of the city. And suddenly, behind him, there’s a bright flash. The city that had grown on the backs of the Mazda trucks for more than a decade had vanished in an instant, and it would be Jujiro and the Mazdas that would lead its rebuilding. But how did the son of a poor fisherman become a Hiroshima success story? How did he set a cork manufacturing company on the path to the Mazda we know today? And how did he and this young company rise to reunite and rebuild a city destroyed by an atomic bomb? Today on Past Gas, part one of our four-part series on Mazda.

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