Minoru Arakawa (荒川 實, Arakawa Minoru) was born on September 3, 1946. He is a Japanese businessman who is most famous for starting and leading Nintendo of America as its president. He also helped start a company called Tetris Online, Inc.
Biography
Minoru Arakawa was born on September 3, 1946, in Kyoto, Japan. He was the second son of Waichiro Arakawa and Michi Ishihara. His older brother, Shoichi, later took over the family business. His sister married a professor of medicine. Waichiro was the manager of Arakawa Textiles and focused more on keeping good relationships with suppliers and customers than on growing the company. Michi was an artist who spent afternoons in the family garden or her studio. Her paintings were displayed at their family home. Arakawa’s family was wealthy; the total real estate owned by his family was about one-fifth of the downtown area in Kyoto.
Arakawa began studying at Kyoto University in 1964. He took general classes for the first two years before focusing on civil engineering. He graduated with a master’s degree in 1969 and moved to Boston in 1971 to continue studying civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He saw several protests against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War but did not take part in them. Arakawa graduated from MIT with a second master’s degree in 1972. After meeting a group of young Japanese businessmen on campus, he decided to look for work with a trading company. When he returned to Japan, he was hired by Marubeni, a company in Tokyo that built hotels and office buildings. At a Christmas party in Kyoto, Arakawa met Yoko Yamauchi, the daughter of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi. They married in November 1973. Arakawa, along with his wife and their three-year-old daughter, Maki, moved to Vancouver, Canada, in 1977 for work. A second daughter, Masayo, was born in 1978.
Hiroshi Yamauchi offered Arakawa the job of starting Nintendo of America. Although Yoko opposed the position, having seen the impact of the company on her father’s life, Arakawa accepted. Arakawa and his wife opened an office in Manhattan in 1980, and Arakawa became the company’s first president. He had some success importing arcade games from the parent company in Japan. Later, he took a risk by placing a large order for Radar Scope, which was not well received. This failure led the parent company to create Donkey Kong. Arakawa turned his warehouse of unused Radar Scope units into a very successful stock of Donkey Kong units. This is when Mario first appeared, and Arakawa is credited with naming him after the office’s Italian landlord, Mario Segale.
Starting in 1985, Arakawa and Howard Lincoln helped rebuild the North American video game industry after the crash of 1983 by launching the Nintendo Entertainment System. Arakawa also hired Howard Phillips, who played an important role in creating the Nintendo Power magazine. In January 2002, Arakawa resigned as president of Nintendo of America and was replaced by Tatsumi Kimishima, the former chief financial officer of Nintendo’s Pokémon subsidiary. Arakawa received a lifetime achievement award in February 2007 at the Interactive Achievement Awards.
In January 2006, Arakawa co-founded Tetris Online, Inc. with Henk Rogers and Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov. The company developed games for Nintendo DS, Wii, iOS, and Facebook. Arakawa served as president of Tetris Online, Inc. until March 2013. He is also an advisor to Avatar Reality.
Arakawa is played by Ken Yamamura in the 2023 movie Tetris.