Biography | Kenichiro Yoshida — The Economics Degree Taken Behind This Red Gate

People treat a Sony chairman as a product of the company's own training rooms.

The first degree was taken here, on the Hongo campus of the University of Tokyo.

Kenichiro Yoshida graduated from the Faculty of Economics in March 1983.

The faculty still lists its address as 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, the same campus a visitor reaches through Akamon, the red gate built in 1827 for the Maeda residence.

Akamon is the public door into that ground.

It is an Important Cultural Property and the photographable pin for a life that otherwise leaves few student-era buildings named in the record.

The economics buildings sit inside the campus behind the gate, not on a separate site.

Sony's official resume begins the following month: April 1983, joined Sony Corporation.

The interval is the ordinary Japanese spring hiring cycle, not a gap year.

He was twenty-three.

Hongo was already the senior-division home of the faculty when he studied here.

The later net-zero laboratory buildings on other campuses are not this story.

A visitor who wants the formation address walks to Akamon from Hongo-sanchome or Todaimae and stands at the gate that still marks the old Maeda estate.

The moment is the degree, not a private lodging.

From this campus he walked into a company that still had its headquarters on the Gotenyama slope in Shinagawa, the cluster later nicknamed Sony Village.

That workplace has been rebuilt.

The red gate has not.

Photo: Tomgally, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons