Nintendo Innovator Hiroshi Yamauchi Rachael L Thomas
Chapter 1 A family Business Nintendo is one of the leading game and electronics companies in the world It was founded in Japan in the late 1800s But Nintendo did not have global recognition until the 1980s This is when Hiroshi Yamauchi changed the company and electronic gaming forever fun fact The name Nintendo comes from three Japanese kanji characters They are nin and ten and do This translates roughly to leave luck to heaven Yamauchi was born in Kyoto Japan in 1927 He had a difficult childhood When Yamauchi was five his father abandoned the family Yamauchi was then raised by his mother’s parents who were very strict In 1939 World War II began The war made life difficult for everyone in Japan including Yamauchi When he was only 12 the Japanese government forced him to leave school He spent the next few years working in a military factory 4 Nintendo’s logo in Japanese kanji characters
Hiroshi Yamauchi was Nintendo’s president for 52 years Once the war was over in 1945 Yamauchi enrolled at Waseda University to study law He was married that same year to a woman named Michiko Inaba Together they would have two daughters and a son But Yamauchi would not finish law school He would leave his studies once again this time for a family member In 1947 Yamauchi’s grandfather Sekiryo Yamauchi the president of Nintendo suffered a stroke Sekiryo asked Yamauchi to leave the university to run the family business Yamauchi agreed In time he would build one of the most successful game companies in the world 5
