After the March 11 disasters, highways were closed and many roads were severed by the impact of the earthquake. But the man who runs Honda Motor Co. needed to get to Honda plants at Tochigi, about 100 kilometers north of Tokyo, as quickly as possible -- a 43-year-old male employee died when the wall of a cafeteria crumbled, and 17 other Honda employees were injured at one of the company's most important sites.

So Takanobu Ito, the top executive at the world's biggest motorcycle maker by volume, took to his Honda CB1100 "naked"...