When Hiroshi Yamauchi was five years old, his father walked out of the family. His mother, unable to manage on her own, gave him up to her own parents. So he was raised in Kyoto by his grandfather, Sekiryo — the man who ran the family's playing-card company, Nintendo. The boy grew up inside the house of the business he would one day command. And he grew up having already learned, very early and very plainly, that the people who are supposed to stay do not always stay.
He was a serious child and, later, a serious student. After the war he went to Tokyo and studied law at Waseda University. He might have become a lawyer, or a salaryman, or any of the ordinary things a law degree leads to. He did not finish it. In 1948, while he was still at Waseda, his grandfather suffered a stroke. The company had no chosen successor — no son, no groomed heir waiting in the wings — and word came to Tokyo that the twenty-one-year-old grandson should come home and take the chair.
He came home. But he did not simply accept. He agreed to take the presidency on a single condition: that he be the only member of the family inside the company. At the time there was an older cousin working at Nintendo. The cousin was let go. Before Hiroshi Yamauchi had run the business for a single day, he had cleared the building of everyone who shared his blood.
It reads as cold, and it was. But it was also exact. A family company is a soft thing, thick with obligations no ledger records — uncles to defer to, cousins to find places for, a grandfather's old loyalties to keep honoring long after they stop making sense. Yamauchi wanted none of it underneath him. He intended to be answerable to the work and to his own judgment, and to nothing else — and a relative on the payroll is a standing claim on a man's judgment. So he removed the claim before it could be made.
He would run Nintendo for the next fifty-three years, and the company he built it into bore the marks of that first morning everywhere: the trust in his own instinct over any committee, the readiness to cut what — or whom — he had decided against. The boy who had been left behind, when power finally came to him at twenty-one, made his first act the leaving of someone else. We like to imagine that ruthlessness is something a person picks up along the way, a habit of success. Sometimes it is older than that. Sometimes it is the hard skin that grows over a place where something was taken away too early to understand.