Biography | 古川俊太郎 Shuntaro Furukawa — The Metropolitan High School on University Avenue

Most profiles of Nintendo's sixth president begin in Kyoto.

The useful years began west of Shinjuku, on the tree line of University Avenue in Kunitachi, where Tokyo Metropolitan Kunitachi Senior High School still stands at Higashi 4-25-1.

Shuntaro Furukawa was born in Tokyo on 10 January 1972.

His father is the animator and illustrator Taku Furukawa.

The family thread is public; the childhood house is not, and this pin stays on the school.

He came up through Fuchu Municipal Wakamatsu Elementary School, then through the city's junior-high system, before crossing into this metropolitan high school.

Kunitachi High sits in a planned academic quarter between the Chuo Line and the Nambu Line, a short walk from Hitotsubashi University and the pedestrian spine locals call Daigaku-dori.

He graduated here in 1990.

The console in the house was a Famicom.

Later accounts, given when he was already a Nintendo officer, describe a boy who favoured third-party cartridges — Koei's Nobunaga's Ambition, baseball games — until a classmate pushed Super Mario Kart at him.

That recommendation is the origin story he has allowed onto the record.

It is not a shrine and not a studio.

It is a public high school whose gates still open onto the same avenue.

The building a visitor photographs today is the school he left, not a museum of his locker.

Stand on the Higashi side and the geography is plain: a Tokyo commuter city that trained a political-economy student who would spend the next thirty years inside one Kyoto company.

From here the next pin is Waseda, then the headquarters at Kamitoba.

Photo: school exterior, Tokyo Metropolitan Kunitachi Senior High School, via Wikimedia Commons