Biography | 이재용 Lee Jae-yong — The Keio MBA at Hiyoshi

After a history degree in Gwanak and a first year on the Samsung payroll, Lee Jae-yong took the management training his family had not sent him to as an undergraduate.

In 1995 he received an MBA from Keio University's Graduate School of Business Administration, known as Keio Business School.

Chosun Ilbo's 2024 English timeline and Kyunghyang Shinmun's October 2022 promotion profile both date the degree to 1995 and name Keio, not Waseda — the Tokyo university his father and grandfather had attended.

The business school has sat on Keio's Hiyoshi campus in Kohoku-ku, Yokohama, for decades. The school itself dates to 1962.

The building most often photographed now is the Collaboration Complex, or Kyoseikan, at 4-1-1 Hiyoshi. That hall opened in 2008.

A 1995 classroom is not the 2008 complex. The pin is the Hiyoshi campus where the school taught, not a later landmark pretending to be the seminar room.

Public Korean and English profiles do not name his adviser, his thesis title, or a specific Hiyoshi building from 1995. Those gaps stay gaps.

What the record supports is the degree, the year, and the campus: a Japanese MBA taken after Suwon, before the later Harvard doctoral coursework he did not finish.

Hiyoshi remains a working Keio campus above the Tokyu Toyoko line. The business school still lists itself there.

Stand at the foot of the hill for the documented turn from Oriental History to formal management training — Yokohama, 1995, Keio, not Seoul and not Waseda.

Photo: Korean Broadcasting System, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 2016).