Sekiryo Kaneda

Career

In 1905, Kaneda married Fusajiro Yamauchi's daughter, Tei, and based on Japanese adult adoption rules, he took the Yamauchi surname on the same day in order to inherit Nintendo. Fusajiro Yamauchi died or retired in 1929, making Kaneda Nintendo's second president.

When Kaneda took over Nintendo, he was in charge of Japan's largest card maker. One of his first decisions was to create a "karuta" division in charge of all educative and child-focused card games.

In 1933, he established Nintendo as a joint venture company called Yamauchi Nintendo. He additionally imposed new works methods and expanded Nintendo international market by selling cheap decks in India and by selling hanafuda decks to Japanese colonists throughout the Japanese colonial empire. Additionally, hanafuda decks are sold to Japanese migrants in the United States during this period. Indeed, hanafuda decks made by Nintendo have been found in the United States dating from 1930s.

The same year, Kaneda expanded Nintendo's headquarters by buying the nearby terrain and building a new building made of cement (which is notable at the time in which few buildings in Japan are made using cement and metal.) using his own company, Haikyô.

During World War II, Nintendo came close to bankruptcy but was saved thanks to a contract with the Japanese government on November 28th 1942 to realise a Uta-garuta deck which used nationalist texts instead of the habitual 100 poems. 15,000 decks were made by December 8th. Nintendo also sold board games with nationalist connotations during this period.

In 1947, he established a distribution company, Marufuku, that would sell new varieties of Western-style playing cards.