, born , was a Japanese

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

who founded the company that is now known as Nintendo. Yamauchi lived in

Kyoto, Japan 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 cit ...

and had a wife and a daughter, Tei Yamauchi, who later married Sekiryo Kaneda.

Before Nintendo

Fusajiro Fukui was born on 22 November 1859, as the eldest son of Sosuke Fukui. Working at Haiko Cement Company, Fukui would receive the surname Yamauchi upon being adopted by Naoshichi Yamauchi in 1872.

Nintendo Koppai

On 23 September 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi opened the first ''

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 sin ...

'' (flower cards) card shop called "Nintendo Koppai", during a time when the Japanese government was banning playing cards from the hands of the public, due to them being tied to gambling, with the exception of Yamauchi's playing cards. With the huge success he had in selling these cards, he rapidly began expanding and opened another card shop in

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of ...

. He later went on to create more card games.

Retirement and death

Fusajiro departed from the company in 1929, leaving his son-in-law

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 ...

(whose name had changed to Sekiryo Yamauchi) in charge of the company. Fusajiro remained uninvolved in the business for the remainder of his life until he died of a stroke on January 1st, 1940, in Kyoto. Fusajiro's great-grandson,

Hiroshi Yamauchi was a Japanese businessman and the third president of Nintendo, joining the company in 1949 until stepping down on 24 May 2002, being subsequently succeeded by Satoru Iwata. During his 53-year tenure, Yamauchi transformed Nintendo from a hanafu ...

, took over Nintendo in September 1949 and ran the company for 53 years, transforming it from a card game company into a multibillion-dollar video gaming company and global conglomerate.

References

External links

Play {{DEFAULTSORT:Yamauchi, Fusajiro 1859 births 1940 deaths 19th-century Japanese businesspeople 20th-century Japanese businesspeople Nintendo people