Biography|Makoto Uchida — The Theology Degree He Took Beside This Chapel

People meet Makoto Uchida as the man who ran Nissan after Carlos Ghosn. The paper trail starts here, on the Imadegawa campus of Doshisha University, between Kyoto Imperial Palace and Shokoku-ji.

He was born in Tokyo on 20 July 1966.

His father's airline posting took the family to Cairo for most of primary school, then to Kuala Lumpur through the middle of high school.

When they came home he finished secondary school at Doshisha International High School in Kyotanabe, a campus built in 1980 for returnee students.

In March 1991 he graduated from Doshisha's Faculty of Theology.

Nissan's own appointment filing lists that degree and that month. The faculty sits on this Imadegawa ground, not on the newer Kyotanabe campus down the Keihan line.

Clark Memorial Hall, the neo-Gothic brick tower at the east end of the yard, was the theology building from 1894 until a new theology hall opened in 1963.

By Uchida's years the lectures had moved into that later hall. The chapel and the tower remained the public face of the faculty, and theology classes still use rooms in the restored Clark building.

The hall is a designated Important Cultural Property. Richard Seel designed it. B. W. Clark and his wife in Brooklyn paid for it in memory of a son who died at twenty-three.

A theology degree is an unusual ticket into a sogo shosha and then into a car company.

The next month he joined Nissho Iwai, the trading house later folded into Sojitz, and spent twelve years on machinery and then automobiles, including a posting in the Philippines.

The path from this chapel to Yokohama was not planned as a CEO track. It was a returnee who wanted work that crossed borders, trained first in a Christian university's theology faculty, then in a trading company's car desk.

Stand on Imadegawa-dori and the brick tower is still the thing a visitor photographs. That is the right pin for the degree. The 1963 theology hall is a short walk west on the same campus.

Photo: Yukke123, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons