The basic platform was an upright, open seating position motorcycle powered by a carbureted, air-cooled engine wrapped in a steel-tube cradle-type frame, and at least one disc brake to bring it all to a stop. The simple design made motorcycling accessible to riders of all types and skill sets. UJMs were available in various displacements, and their ubiquity helped grow motorcycling in America during the 1970s and ‘80s.
Universal Japanese Motorcycle, or UJM, is a loose term for a Japanese standard motorcycle type admired for their simplicity, quality, versatility, and high power, made mainly from the late 1960s and through the late 1970s, and somewhat less so ever since. The nadir of standard motorcycles in the 1990s fueled a nostalgia for UJM style machines, and led to the reintroduction of new models on similar lines, from both Japan and other countries, sometimes going by new names like naked bike or muscle bike.[2]
In the late 1960s the major Japanese motorcycle manufacturers, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha, began replicating each other's designs in quick succession, resulting in a remarkable homogeneity of form, function and quality in the market, leading Cycle to coin the term in 1976 to describe the new phenomenon:
The bikes clustered around the following feature set:
A prominent example of the classic UJM is the 1969 Honda CB750, which was considered at the time to be the first "superbike", With its inline four engine, it became a template for subsequent designs from the other three Japanese manufacturers.[4][5]
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