Biography | Kenichiro Yoshida — The Tsurumaru Campus That Sent Him North From Kagoshima

People look for Sony's chairman in a Tokyo tower.

The school that sent him north still stands on Yakushi in Kagoshima.

Kenichiro Yoshida was born on 20 October 1959 in Kumamoto Prefecture, where his father, a court judge, was posted at the time.

The family moved with those postings.

He completed secondary school at Kagoshima Prefectural Tsurumaru High School, at 2-1-1 Yakushi.

Tsurumaru is the successor of the old First Kagoshima Middle School and the First Girls' High School.

The merged school took the Tsurumaru name in 1949 and the prefectural title in 1956.

In 1964 it moved onto this Yakushi site, the former First Middle School ground, and the classroom blocks a visitor sees now sit on that rebuilt campus.

A student born in October 1959 would have finished the ordinary three-year course here around March 1978.

The next documented step is the Faculty of Economics at the University of Tokyo, from which he graduated in March 1983.

Tsurumaru remains one of Kagoshima's selective public high schools.

It is not a museum and not a private house.

The pin is the school gate and grounds, a public prefectural campus still in daily use.

From the west exit of Kagoshima-Chuo Station the walk is about twelve minutes.

The moment that matters here is formation: a judge's son, born on a Kumamoto posting, left Kyushu from this yard for Tokyo.

Sony's later finance rooms and the Konan headquarters are a different chapter.

This campus is the last public address before the capital.

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