Biography | 古川俊太郎 Shuntaro Furukawa — The Seventh-Floor Room Where He Became the Sixth President

Nintendo has had six presidents since 1889.

The sixth took the chair in a conference room on the seventh floor of the Development Center at 2-1 Minamimatsuda-cho, Higashikujo, Minami-ku, Kyoto.

The 78th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders opened at 10 a.m. on 28 June 2018.

The official English convocation notice names that room and that hour.

Shareholders elected five directors, Furukawa among them.

The board that sat after the meeting named him Representative Director and President.

Tatsumi Kimishima, the fifth president, moved to adviser.

Some Japanese summaries print 30 June as the start date.

That line is the after-meeting formalisation; the resolution notice Nintendo posted the same day is dated 28 June.

He was forty-six.

He was not a designer.

The company that appointed him was already running the Switch, whose planning office he had helped staff from 2015.

The Development Center itself opened in 2014, on a lot a short walk from the Kamitoba headquarters building of 2000.

It is a documented venue for that day's meeting, not a map of anyone's current desk.

Photo: xanday, Nintendo Kyoto Development Complex, 3 April 2014, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons