Hiroshi Yamauchi
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was a Japanese businessman and the third president of
Nintendo is a Japanese Multinational corporation, multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produce ...
, joining the company in 1949 until stepping down on 24 May 2002, being subsequently succeeded by
Satoru Iwata was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer, video game designer, and producer. He was the fourth President (corporate title), president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nintendo from 2002 until his death in 2015. He was a major contr ...
. During his 53-year tenure, Yamauchi transformed Nintendo from a
hanafuda are a style of Japanese playing cards. They are typically smaller than Western playing cards, only , but thicker and stiffer. On the face of each card is a depiction of plants, ''tanzaku'' (短冊), animals, birds, or man-made objects. One single ...
card-making company that had been active solely in Japan into a multibillion-dollar
video game publisher A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that have been developed either internally by the publisher or externally by a video game developer. They often finance the development, sometimes by paying a video game developer ( ...
and global conglomerate. He was the great-grandson of
Fusajirō Yamauchi , born , was a Japanese entrepreneur who founded the company that is now known as Nintendo. Yamauchi lived in Kyoto, Japan and had a wife and a daughter, Tei Yamauchi, who later married Sekiryo Kaneda. Before Nintendo Fusajiro Fukui was bo ...
, Nintendo's first president and founder. In April 2013,
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estimated Yamauchi's net worth at $2.1 billion; he was the 13th richest person in Japan and the 491st richest in the world. In 2008, Yamauchi was Japan's wealthiest person with a fortune at that time estimated at $7.8 billion. At the time of his death, Yamauchi was the largest shareholder at Nintendo.


Early life

Yamauchi was born in
Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...
to father Shikanojo Inaba and mother Kimi. His father abandoned them both when he was five years old, and his mother was unable to cope as a single parent so she gave him up to her parents. With his grandfather being a business owner, this adoption aligned his future inheritance of what would become Nintendo. He was sent to a preparatory school in Kyoto at age twelve. He planned to study law or engineering, but
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
disrupted his studies. Since he was too young to fight, he was put to work in a military factory. Once the war ended in 1945, Yamauchi went to
Waseda University , abbreviated as , is a private university, private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the ''Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō'' by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902. The university has numerou ...
to study law. He married Michiko Inaba. With the absence of Yamauchi's father, his grandparents met to arrange the marriage.


Nintendo career


Early career

In 1948, Yamauchi's grandfather and president of Nintendo,
Sekiryo Kaneda , also known as , was the second president of what is now Nintendo Co., Ltd., from 1929 to 1949. He married the daughter of Fusajiro Yamauchi, Tei Yamauchi, and took the Yamauchi surname. Kaneda retired in 1949 after suffering a stroke, leaving ...
, suffered a stroke. As he had no other immediate successor, he asked Yamauchi to come immediately to Nintendo to assume the job of president. He had to leave his law degree at
Waseda University , abbreviated as , is a private university, private research university in Shinjuku, Tokyo. Founded in 1882 as the ''Tōkyō Senmon Gakkō'' by Ōkuma Shigenobu, the school was formally renamed Waseda University in 1902. The university has numerou ...
to do so. Yamauchi would only accept the position if he were the only family member working at Nintendo. Reluctantly, Yamauchi's grandfather agreed, and died shortly thereafter in 1949. Under the agreement, his older cousin had to be fired. Due to his young age and total lack of management experience, most employees did not take Yamauchi seriously and resented him. Soon after taking over, he had to deal with a strike by factory employees who expected him to cave in easily. Instead, he asserted his authority by firing many long-time employees who questioned his authority. He had the company name changed to Nintendo Karuta and established its new headquarters in Kyoto. Yamauchi led Nintendo in a "notoriously imperialistic style". He was the sole judge of potential new products, and only a product that appealed to him and his instincts went on the market. He was the first to introduce the plastic Western playing card into the Japanese market. Western playing cards were still a novelty in Japan and the public associated them with Western-styled gambling games such as
poker Poker is a family of comparing card games in which players wager over which hand is best according to that specific game's rules. It is played worldwide, however in some places the rules may vary. While the earliest known form of the game w ...
and bridge. Most gambling activities were technically illegal by default with only the few legally sanctioned exceptions of horse racing, pachinko, and
lottery A lottery is a form of gambling that involves the drawing of numbers at random for a prize. Some governments outlaw lotteries, while others endorse it to the extent of organizing a national or state lottery. It is common to find some degree of ...
. Therefore, the market for anything which was associated with gambling, including
hanafuda are a style of Japanese playing cards. They are typically smaller than Western playing cards, only , but thicker and stiffer. On the face of each card is a depiction of plants, ''tanzaku'' (短冊), animals, birds, or man-made objects. One single ...
, was limited. Yamauchi's first "hit" came when he made a licensing agreement with Walt Disney in 1959 for his plastic playing cards. Nintendo targeted its playing cards as a tool for party games that the whole family could enjoy, a foreshadowing of the company's approach going into the 21st century. Disney's tie-in was made towards that end. Nintendo's Disney playing card was also accompanied by a small, thin booklet with many tutorials for different card games. The strategy succeeded and the product sold an unprecedented 600,000 units in one year, soon gracing Nintendo with the domination of the Japanese playing card market. With this success, Yamauchi once again changed the company name to Nintendo Company Limited and took the company
public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the ''Öffentlichkei ...
and became the chairman. He then decided to travel to the U.S. to visit the
United States Playing Card Company The United States Playing Card Company (USPC, though also commonly known as USPCC) is a large American producer and distributor of playing cards. It was established in 1867 as Russell, Morgan & Co. and founded in its current incarnation in 1885. ...
, the world's biggest manufacturer of playing cards. Upon arriving in Cincinnati, Yamauchi was disappointed to see a small-scale office and factory. This led to the realization that card manufacturing was an extremely limited venture. Upon his return to Japan, Yamauchi decided to diversify the company. Some of the new areas he ventured into included a taxi company called Daiya, a love hotel with rooms rented by the hour (which he reportedly frequented), and individually portioned instant rice. All of these ventures eventually failed and brought the company into the brink of bankruptcy. However, one day, Yamauchi spotted a factory engineer named
Gunpei Yokoi , sometimes transliterated Gumpei Yokoi, was a Japanese video game designer. He was a long-time Nintendo employee, best known as creator of the Game & Watch handheld system, inventor of the cross-shaped Control Pad, the original designer of th ...
playing with a simple extendable claw, something Yokoi made to amuse himself during his break. Yamauchi ordered Yokoi to develop the extendable claw into a proper product. The product was named the
Ultra Hand Ultra Hand is a toy that was manufactured by Nintendo in the late 1960s. It was created in 1966 by Gunpei Yokoi, who would later design the Love Tester, the D-pad, the Game Boy, and the WonderSwan. Ultra Hand consists of several criss-cross-co ...
and was an instant hit. It was then that Yamauchi decided to move Nintendo's focus into toy making. With an already established distribution system into department stores for its playing cards, the transition was a natural one for Nintendo. Yamauchi created a new department called Games and Setup, manned initially by only Yokoi and another employee who looked after the finances and was situated in a warehouse in Kyoto for the purpose of research and development. Gunpei Yokoi was solely assigned to develop new products. Yokoi utilized his degree in engineering by developing what is now known as electric toys such as the
Love Tester The is a novelty toy made by Nintendo in 1969. Designed "for young ladies and men", the device tries to determine how much two people love each other. To operate the device, both users grab one of the connected spherical metal sensors with one ...
and a light gun using solar cells for targets. These electric toys were quite a novelty in the 1960s when most other toys were simple in origin, such as toy blocks or dolls. Eventually, Nintendo succeeded in establishing itself as a major player in the toy market.


Beginning of the electronics era

Yamauchi realized that technological breakthroughs in the electronic industry meant that electronics could be incorporated into entertainment products since the prices were decreasing.
Atari Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc. (1972–1992), Atari, Inc., ...
and
Magnavox Magnavox (Latin for "great voice", stylized as MAGNAVOX) is an American electronics company that since 1974 has been a subsidiary of the Dutch electronics corporation Philips. The predecessor to Magnavox was founded in 1911 by Edwin Pridham and ...
were already selling gaming devices for use with television sets. Yamauchi negotiated a license with Magnavox to sell its game console, the
Magnavox Odyssey The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. The hardware was designed by a small team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates, while Magnavox completed development and released it in the United States in September ...
. After hiring several
Sharp Electronics is a Japanese multinational corporation that designs and manufactures electronic products, headquartered in Sakai-ku, Sakai, Osaka Prefecture. Since 2016 it has been majority owned by the Taiwan-based Foxconn Group. Sharp employs more than 50 ...
employees, Nintendo launched the Color TV Game 6 in Japan, which was followed by several revisions and updates of this series. Yamauchi had Nintendo expand into the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
to take advantage of the growing American arcade market. He hired his son-in-law
Minoru Arakawa is a Japanese businessman best known as the founder and former president of Nintendo of America, and the co-founder of Tetris Online, Inc. Biography Minoru Arakawa was born on 3 September 1946 in Kyoto, Japan, the second son of Waichiro Arakaw ...
to head the new American operation. Their Japanese hits such as ''
Radar Scope is a 1980 shoot 'em up arcade game developed by Nintendo R&D2 and published by Nintendo. The player assumes the role of the Sonic Spaceport starship and must wipe out formations of an enemy race known as the Gamma Raiders before they destroy t ...
'', ''
Space Fever is a 1979 arcade game by Nintendo R&D2. Some sources claim that Ikegami Tsushinki also did programming work on ''Space Fever''. It was released in both monochrome and color versions. The gameplay is similar to ''Space Invaders'', which had been ...
'', and ''
Sheriff A sheriff is a government official, with varying duties, existing in some countries with historical ties to England where the office originated. There is an analogous, although independently developed, office in Iceland that is commonly transla ...
'' did not achieve the same success in the United States, so Yamauchi turned to designer
Shigeru Miyamoto is a Japanese video game designer, producer and game director at Nintendo, where he serves as one of its representative directors. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential designers in the history of video games, he is ...
's pet project, ''
Donkey Kong is a video game franchise created by Shigeru Miyamoto and owned by Nintendo. It follows the adventures of a gorilla named Donkey Kong (character), Donkey Kong and his clan of other Ape, apes and monkeys. The franchise primarily consists of plat ...
'' in 1981, which became a smash hit. Yamauchi infused Nintendo with a unique industrial development process.Boyer, Steven. "A Virtual Failure: Evaluating the Success of Nintendos Virtual Boy". Velvet Light Trap.64 (2009): 23–33. ProQuest Research Library. Web. 24 May 2012. He instituted three separate research and development units, which competed with one another and aimed for innovation. This system fostered a high degree of both unusual and successful gadgets. Yokoi, who headed R&D1, created the first portable LCD video game featuring a microprocessor called the
Game & Watch The Game & Watch brand ( ''Gēmu & Uotchi''; called ''Tricotronic'' in West Germany and Austria, abbreviated as ''G&W'') is a series of handheld electronic games developed, manufactured, released, and marketed by Nintendo from 1980 in video gam ...
. Although the Game & Watch was successful, Yamauchi wanted something that was cheap enough that most could buy it yet unique enough so that it would dominate the market for as long as possible.


Nintendo Entertainment System

Yamauchi was so confident with the Famicom that he promised an electronics company one million unit orders within two years. The Famicom easily reached that goal. After selling several million units, Yamauchi realized the importance of the software that ran on the game systems and made sure the system was easy to program. Yamauchi believed that technicians did not create excellent games, but artists did. The Famicom was released in the United States as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Yamauchi, with no engineering or video game background, was the only one deciding which games were to be released. His remarkable intuition for what people would want in the future may have been one of the reasons for Nintendo's success. To help spring creativity, he created three research and development groups and allowed them to compete against each other. This caused the designers to work harder to try to get their games approved.


Super Nintendo Entertainment System

In 1990, the Super Famicom was released in Japan. It was released a year later in North America and in 1992 in Europe, in both regions as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). The Super Famicom was sold out within three days in Japan and had gamers camping for days outside shops in hope of getting the next shipment. Nintendo showed major expansion during this period with new plants, R&D facilities and a partnership with Rare. Yamauchi had displayed from the beginning a knack at identifying good games even though he had never played them, and he continued to do so alone until at least 1994. A 1995 article in '' Next Generation'' reported that Yamauchi, though 68 years old, "remains very much in charge" of Nintendo and called him "The most feared and respected man in the videogame industry". In 1995, the
Virtual Boy The Virtual Boy is a 32-bit tabletop portable video game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. Released in 1995, it was marketed as the first console capable of displaying stereoscopic "3D" graphics. The player uses the console like ...
was released but did not sell well. Nevertheless, Yamauchi said at a press conference that he still had faith in it and that the company would continue developing games for it. In the fiscal year ending 31 March 1995, Nintendo achieved revenues of 416 billion yen.


Nintendo 64

In 1996, Nintendo released its new, fully 3D capable console, the Nintendo 64. Around this time Yamauchi publicly stated that he wanted to retire but did not think there were any good candidates to succeed him yet. A year later, he announced that he would retire by 2000, regardless of the lack of a good successor, and in particular wanted to end his career with the launch of the
64DD The is a magnetic floppy disk drive peripheral for the Nintendo 64 game console developed by Nintendo. It was announced in 1995, prior to the Nintendo 64's 1996 launch, and after numerous delays was released in Japan on December 13, 1999. The ...
. In 1999, Yamauchi and Nintendo announced their intentions to work on a new system with an IBM Gekko processor and Matsushita DVD technology codenamed Dolphin. This system was named GameCube. Yamauchi talked at E3 about the impact that the release of Xbox would have on the GameCube.


GameCube

Yamauchi touted the GameCube as a machine designed exclusively to be a video game console, opting not to include media playback. This emphasis towards "performance only" and the creation of hardware that would allow developers to "easily create games" is what Yamauchi believed would set the GameCube apart from its competitors. Yamauchi also wanted the machine to be the least expensive of its kind, in his belief that people "do not play with the game machine itself. They play with the software, and they are forced to purchase a game machine in order to use the software. Therefore the price of the machine should be as cheap as possible." Nintendo hence priced the GameCube significantly less expensively than its rivals in the market, although the console's games were priced identically to those designed for the competing systems.


Post-Nintendo presidency

On 24 May 2002, Yamauchi stepped down as president of Nintendo and was succeeded by the head of Nintendo's Corporate Planning Division,
Satoru Iwata was a Japanese businessman, video game programmer, video game designer, and producer. He was the fourth President (corporate title), president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Nintendo from 2002 until his death in 2015. He was a major contr ...
. Yamauchi subsequently became the chairman of Nintendo's board of directors. He left the board on 29 June 2005, due to his age, and because he believed that he was leaving the company in good hands. Yamauchi also refused to accept his retirement pension, which was reported to be around $9 to $14 million, believing that Nintendo could put it to better use. He remained Nintendo's largest shareholder, and as of 2008 retained a 10% share in Nintendo. He was the 12th richest man in Japan due to his shares in Nintendo since its success with the Wii and Nintendo DS consoles. He donated the majority of the 7.5 billion yen to build a new cancer treatment center in Kyoto. In 2006, he founded
Shigureden is a museum in Arashiyama, Kyoto, Japan, centered on the ''Ogura Hyakunin Isshu'' anthology of ''waka'' poems compiled by Fujiwara no Teika in the 13th century. The museum was founded by former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who invested m ...
, a museum of poetry in Kyoto.


Personal life

In 1950, Yamauchi's wife Michiko gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Yōko. During the next few years, Michiko had several miscarriages and was often ill. In 1957, she gave birth to another daughter, Fujiko and, shortly after, a son named Katsuhito. Michiko Inaba died on 29 July 2012, aged 82. When Yamauchi's father, Shikanojō, returned years later to see his son, Yamauchi refused to speak to him. When Yamauchi was close to 30, his half-sister contacted him and informed him that Shikanojō had died of a stroke. At the funeral, he met his father's wife and their four daughters whom he never knew existed. He began feeling sorry that he had not taken the opportunity to reconcile with his father when he was still alive. The death of his father changed Yamauchi, and he grieved for months and cried freely. From then on he made regular visits to his father's grave. Yamauchi has been described as a stern man with a single-minded focus on his business. He did not play video games; his sole serious hobby was the strategy board game Go, though
Masayuki Uemura was a Japanese engineer, video game producer, and professor. He was known for his work as an employee of Nintendo from 1971 to 2004, most notably for serving as a key factor in the development of the Nintendo Entertainment System. A former em ...
, the primary engineer of the original NES, has stated that he also enjoyed
hanafuda are a style of Japanese playing cards. They are typically smaller than Western playing cards, only , but thicker and stiffer. On the face of each card is a depiction of plants, ''tanzaku'' (短冊), animals, birds, or man-made objects. One single ...
and would play cards with Nintendo employees at parties. He was ranked a seventh Dan at Go, roughly equivalent to
chessmaster ''Chessmaster'' is a chess-playing computer game series, which is owned and developed by Ubisoft. It is the best-selling chess franchise in history, with more than five million units sold . Timeline *1986: '' The Chessmaster 2000''. First pub ...
.


Ownership of the Seattle Mariners

In the early 1990s, the professional baseball team the
Seattle Mariners The Seattle Mariners are an American professional baseball team based in Seattle. They compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) American League West, West division. The team joined the American League ...
were available for sale and
United States Senator The United States Senate is the Upper house, upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the United States House of Representatives, House of Representatives being the Lower house, lower chamber. Together they compose the national Bica ...
Slade Gorton Thomas Slade Gorton III (January 8, 1928 – August 19, 2020) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States Senator from Washington from 1981 to 1987 and again from 1989 until 2001. A member of the Republican Party, he hel ...
asked Nintendo of America to find a Japanese investor who would keep the club in Seattle. Yamauchi offered to buy the franchise, even though he had never been to a baseball game. Although the owner accepted the offer, the MLB commissioner
Fay Vincent Francis Thomas Vincent Jr. (born May 29, 1938), known as Fay Vincent, is a former entertainment lawyer, securities regulator, and sports executive who served as the eighth Commissioner of Major League Baseball from September 13, 1989 to Septembe ...
and ownership committee were strongly opposed to the idea of a non-North American owner and did not approve the deal. However, following the strong support and sentiments of the people of Seattle and press the commissioner formally approved the deal, under the condition that Yamauchi had less than 50% of the vote. This was a major development in American baseball, because this opened the gates for Japanese baseball players to American league teams, which had been previously denied. In 2000, the club made its first profit of $2.6 million since its acquisition by Yamauchi. Yamauchi never attended a Mariners game.


Death

On 19 September 2013, aged 85, Yamauchi died at a hospital following complications of
pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severity ...
. Nintendo released a statement stating that its staff members were mourning the loss of their former president.


References


External links

*
IGN's report
on Yamauchi's leaving of the board of directors
N-Sider.com
s article on ''The Mind Behind the Empire''

of the Hiroshi Yamauchi interview at Nikkei Business Daily * (
Waybacked The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...
)
The World's Billionaires: #149 Hiroshi Yamauchi
Forbes
Yamauchi No.10 Family Office
official website of Yamauchi's family office {{DEFAULTSORT:Yamauchi, Hiroshi 20th-century Japanese businesspeople 21st-century Japanese businesspeople 1927 births 2013 deaths Deaths from pneumonia in Japan Japanese billionaires Japanese philanthropists Japanese video game businesspeople Major League Baseball owners Nintendo people People from Kyoto Seattle Mariners owners Waseda University alumni 20th-century philanthropists