Biography|Masamichi Kogai — The Aobayama Faculty He Finished in 1977

People assume a future car president grew up around engines.

Kogai later described the first cars that mattered to him as the ones his Sendai classmates already owned.

He finished the Faculty of Engineering at Tohoku University in 1977.

The engineering schools sit on the Aobayama campuses above the Hirose River, east of the old castle grounds.

In a 2017 account he listed the cars those friends drove: a Ken and Mary Skyline, a Toyopet Corona, a Corolla, a Minica.

He rode in the passenger seat to campus and on the long trip back toward Nagano.

The household in Chino had never owned a car.

A father who had been a Dendenkosha engineer made manufacturing feel ordinary rather than exotic.

He took a driving licence soon after arriving in Sendai.

By March 1977 the degree was done.

In April he reported to Toyo Kogyo in Hiroshima, the firm that still printed that older name on the gate.

The photograph shows the School of Engineering buildings on Aobayama.

Newer wings have been added since 1977.

The ridge is the same one a production-minded student would have climbed to class.

Nothing here is a Mazda plant.

It is the last campus before the plants.

Photo: 石巻敗祖, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons