Biography | 佐藤恒治 Koji Sato — The Toyota-cho Lot Where He Signed On as an Engineer

A Toyota career is often told as if it begins on an assembly line.

Sato's official chronology begins at the head office.

In April 1992, the month after he left Waseda, he joined Toyota Motor Corporation.

The registered head office is 1 Toyota-cho, Toyota City, Aichi — the same lot that holds the Honsha Plant.

The present headquarters tower opened in February 2005.

The address itself is older.

The city renamed the ground Toyota-cho when the company and the town grew into each other.

Sato's first posting, recorded by the company, was the Technology Administration Division in September 1992.

He was assigned to the project that introduced a center system for the technical departments.

Two years later the same official list puts him in Chassis Engineering Department No. 2.

There he worked the suspension of the first-generation Prius and the Vista.

The Prius would not reach Japanese customers until December 1997.

The pin is not a later corner office.

It is the company gate a twenty-two-year-old engineer entered.

Japanese Wikipedia places his birth in Tokyo on 19 October 1969.

The company page prints the birthday and the nationality and then jumps to the 1992 hire.

That jump is the point of this memory.

Everything that followed — Lexus, Gazoo Racing, the presidency — starts from this lot in Toyota City.

Photo: Tokumeigakarinoaoshima, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons