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September 23, 2024

— Shigeru Miyamoto

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Leave luck to heaven

I've never been to Japan. Still, I like to imagine what life must have been like for Fusajiro Yamauchi.

If you don't know who Yamauchi was, let's remedy that. Born in 1859 in Kyoto, son of a craftsman, Yamauchi entered into an arranged marriage at age 17 -- a union that may have been prompted by the fact that his new wife had no brothers.

This meant that her father, who owned a company that either excavated or processed lime, had no male heirs.

"Hey, how about me?" Yamauchi asked his new father-in-law (I'm paraphrasing, of course), and he inherited the business. His father-in-law actually adopted him, as was apparently the custom back then in Japan if you wanted to leave a business to someone.

From there, he expanded, grew, and opened a few more companies. When Japan eased its anti-gambling laws in the late 1880s, Yamauchi got really into "Hanafuda" Japanese-style playing cards, and he started manufacturing them as well.

The date of this new company? September 23, 1889, so 135 years ago today.

Yamauchi's new business was very successful. His cards became popular because of their high quality and the image of Napoleon that he used as a trademark. Yamauchi had some good marketing and sales ideas, too:

First, negotiating to sell directly to gambling clubhouses, which needed a steady supply of cards since they avoided using any deck more than once (to prevent cheating).

Then, as Western-style cards -- known in Japan back then, I kid you not, as "Trump cards" -- became popular, he shifted into producing them as well.

The one thing Yamauchi didn't have, ironically, was a son, and since Japan was still pretty sexist (just saying), he sought out an arranged marriage for his own daughter to one of his longtime employees.

That employee's name was Sekiryo Kaneda, who not only married Yamauchi's daughter and inherited the company -- but also was adopted by his father-in-law, and changed his name to Yamauchi.

World War II came and devastated the country, but the Yamauchis' business somehow survived. Then, another generation took over -- Hiroshi Yamauchi, age 21 at the time, who was the grandson of Sekiryo Kaneda Yamauchi -- and the Yamauchi firm negotiated a lucrative deal to publish cards featuring Disney characters.

That kept things going for only a few years, and Hiroshi Yamauchi tried an impressive variety of products and services to keep the family firm going: everything from running a taxi business to selling instant rice.

And then, in 1966, 77 years after the initial launch, the company recruited an engineer who came up with the idea that changed everything: the Ultra Hand.

Maybe this is a good time to reveal that the company we are talking about was the Nintendo Playing Card Company, which we all know now as Nintendo, which is the multinational entertainment company known for producing some of the world's most popular video games and consoles.

Ultra Hand represented the company's first foray into kids' toys. It was basically a plastic, expandable set of tongs like you can find in most variety stores now, but it turned out to be a providential pivot.

From there, the engineer who came up with that idea (quite popular, by the way), Gunpei Yokoi, went on to develop mechanical puzzles, an electronic novelty called the "Love Tester," and -- we're fast-forwarding here, but how else am I going to cover the entire 135-year history of an iconic company -- and was involved in the creation of both the 1980s video game Donkey Kong and the first handheld game device that could play multiple games by switching cartridges: the Game Boy.

Today, in case it's been a while since you've been into video games, Nintendo's latest game console is the Nintendo Switch, which has been around since 2017 and is number-3 on the "most game consoles sold" list, with more than 143 million units sold.

With my work for Inc. and some of my books, I write a lot about the history of iconic companies: Berkshire-Hathaway, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's more times than I can count, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, most of the airlines. But, I don't think until today I've dug into the early history of a firm as old as this that didn't have its roots in the United States or Europe.

The name Nintendo, if you break it into the Japanese characters, supposedly means "leave luck to heaven." And that's a pretty good quote of the day.

But there's a quote from another famous Nintendo game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, whose work has sold more than 1 billion copies, that I think is both apt and good to remember:

Take your time. And keep an eye out for providential pivots.

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Did you see ...

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• In 1951, a 6-year-old boy was abducted from a park in California. Now, more than 70 years later, he's been identified as the result of a DNA test. The man, who grew up in North Carolina served two tours as a Marine in Vietnam and had a career as a firefighter, said he had some memories of the abduction and his trip to the East Coast, but when he questioned adults in his life, they did not give him answers. He's reunited with family but asked to keep his experience private beyond what I've shared here. (Los Angeles Times)