Biography|Masamichi Kogai — The Fuchu Gate Where He Joined Toyo Kogyo

People treat Mazda's headquarters as a building that always said Mazda.

In April 1977 the company Kogai joined was still Toyo Kogyo Co., Ltd., at 3-1 Shinchi, Fuchu-cho, Aki-gun, Hiroshima.

The stock-exchange name changed later.

The site is the same river-plain campus that still holds the head office and part of the Hiroshima plant.

He entered on the production side, not in sales.

Mazda's officer chronology lists that April 1977 date with no other first posting.

The work that followed stayed inside factories for a long time.

In June 2004 the same company made him executive officer and general manager of the Hofu Plant in Yamaguchi.

In April 2006 it sent him to Rayong as president of AutoAlliance Thailand, the Ford-Mazda joint plant on the Eastern Seaboard.

Those later titles are other pins.

This one is only the first clock-in.

A visitor standing at Shinchi sees a later head-office block, photographed in 2020.

The 1977 gate is gone in that picture.

The ground is not.

Thirty-six years after this April he would take the presidency in the same compound.

Photo: Taisyo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons