Biography | 稲盛和夫 Kazuo Inamori — The Yakushi Schoolyard Where a Printer's Second Son Began

People treat Inamori as a Kyoto industrialist who appeared fully formed.

He was a Kagoshima child first, and the neighborhood still has a public address for that start.

Kazuo Inamori was born on 30 January 1932 in Yakushicho, Kagoshima City, the second of seven children of Kesaichi and Kimi Inamori.

Company records use that January date; some encyclopedia lines still print 21 January.

His parents worked in printing.

In 1938 he entered Kagoshima Municipal Nishida Elementary School, then already on this Yakushi ground after an earlier move from Nishida-cho.

The school sits at Yakushi 2-31-1, inside the same district the family named as home.

This pin is the school, not a private house.

The family house burned in the 1945 air raid on the city; the exact lot is not published here.

What survives as a civic site is the elementary school he later praised for its song about a straight heart.

He failed the exam for the First Kagoshima Junior High School.

A bout of pulmonary infiltration kept him in bed, then a teacher pushed him toward the private Kagoshima Junior High.

The printer's second son left this schoolyard for chemistry, ceramics, and two companies.

A visitor standing at the gate is standing in the district he named when he talked about being born.

Photo: later portrait of Inamori, Naotake Murayama, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The photograph was taken in Palo Alto, not on this schoolyard.