When Koichi Yano, then a 4th year student at Fukuoka Industrial College, was asked by the industrialist Yoshitaro Murakami to repair his French-built De Dion-Bouton automobile, it set him down the road of researching and designing his own vehicle. Yano took the rear-engine rear-wheel drive De Dion-Bouton and converted into a front-engine rear-wheel drive car, before drawing up blueprints based on a small British-made car (possibly an Austin Baby). Borrowing manufacturing facilities from Murakami's operations, Yano succeeded in building his own car in 1916 using De Dion-Bouton parts. The car, called Arrow featured a two-cylinder water-cooled engine, built under the instruction of Professor Iwaoka at Kyushu University, with manufacturing support from the university's machine shop. It also had a carburetor manufactured by Zenith in France, a Bosch Magneto ignition device as the spark plug, and wheels and tires originally designed for use with motorbikes. The car was used for approximately 2 years by the people who had backed its construction, and it even obtained a government license.
