Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [4]
Hiroshi’s great-grandfather Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a Kyoto card shop in 1894 manufacturing colorful flower cards called hanafuda , and named the shop Nintendo Koppai. (The word “Nintendo” means “leave luck to heaven” or “We do what we can,” which suggests the chance inherent in card games.) He sold to gamblers, who used a new deck every hand. The company hung on through thick and thin over the years, following Japan’s economic roller-coaster as it crashed after World War II, rebounded, then crashed again after the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
Hiroshi Yamauchi, who at age twenty-one took over from his grandfather in 1949 after the older man suffered a stroke, was at the forefront of Nintendo’s changes. Yamauchi tried out various new business models—rice, taxicabs, “love hotels” rentable by the hour. None clicked, until he decided to utilize his network of card and toy shops. His single-minded dedication to running his company his way made him few friends. Even his family was distant: his children were virtual strangers who feared him the rare times he was home. Like so many family businesses, the business became more important than the family it was supposed to enrich.
A family member would be needed to run the new American branch of Nintendo, Yamauchi knew. But who? Yamauchi’s son, Katsuhito, was too young to take over an American division, despite being older than Hiroshi was when he assumed control of the whole company. His other two kids were girls, Yoko and Fujiko. But the Yamauchis had a history of bringing sons-in-law into the family business. So his eldest daughter Yoko’s husband would run the U.S. branch.
If only the son-in-law wanted the job. Minoru “Mino” Arakawa, Yoko’s husband, was the second son of a wealthy Kyoto textile family. Mino had Western experience—he and Yoko were living in Canada for his real estate development job with the zaibatsu Marubeni. He spoke English, had a graduate degree from MIT, and had driven across the United States in a VW bus. He was a far cry from Yamauchi, a man so callous he took his daughter to one of his favorite geisha clubs for her twentieth birthday—and stayed there after she went home.
Arakawa turned down Nintendo jobs before, but Yamauchi was bred by his grandparents to be persistent. (Hiroshi’s father had abandoned his family, and a probable Nintendo presidency, for another woman.) In the end, Arakawa accepted the role as president of a new subsidiary, Nintendo of America. Taking the job meant going against his wife’s wishes—Yoko had a distant relationship with both her father and his company—but Yamauchi was just that convincing about the expansion opportunities. At least Arakawa didn’t have to change his last name to Yamauchi, like the two previous sons-in-law.
Nevertheless, Yoko’s bad premonitions were seemingly confirmed the day they left on a road trip from Vancouver to New York. They had set up a Seattle-based “distribution channel”—really just two truckers named Ron Judy and Al Stone, who had been importing used Nintendo arcade cabinets from Hawaii, and reselling them locally. Before heading out to the East Coast, Arakawa hired them, on commission, to set up distribution channels for the North American market. Then it was time to drive cross country to set up the New York headquarters of Nintendo of America. What was the bad omen? The day the couple crossed over from Canada into Washington State, May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.