Career details 1/5 1958 – 1977｜Kurashiki, Okayama — school years
The origin: "If it doesn't exist, build it all yourself"
Born in Kurashiki, Okayama, in 1958. He taught himself TV repair in junior high school; in high school he built everything from scratch—from a machine that records sound to a machine that creates sound, and even rockets. Graduated from Kurashiki Minami High School in 1977.
Junior high school — starting with TV repair
- Taught himself how to repair televisions
- Repaired discarded TVs and gave them to friends and teachers
A fully self-built record-cutting machine (2nd year of high school, 1976)
A "machine that engraves sound"—styluses, cutter head, drive circuits, and grinder, all built by hand.
- Ground and heat-treated hundreds of cutting styluses under a microscope; it took 18 months to produce a stylus that cut grooves silently
- Also self-built the driver that vibrates the stylus, the cutter-head feed mechanism, and the guide
- Built the mirror-coating and mirror-polishing equipment for the master discs
- Built an inverse-RIAA equalizer (boosting the treble) to match record standards
- Produced a 33-rpm LP recording 23 minutes of audio
- The story was broadcast by NHK
A self-built 4-voice analog synthesizer (3rd year of high school, 1977)
A mass of op-amps and patch cords—a "machine that creates sound," even generating arbitrary waveforms digitally.
- A 4-voice architecture with self-built VCO, VCF, VCA, ADSR, and F-V converter modules
- Realized arbitrary waveform generation through digital processing
- All circuit boards etched from self-made photomasks
- Built a dual-trace curve tracer just to match diode pairs
- The panel work was the hardest part—and the budget didn't stretch to knobs
Rockets
- Rocket fuel, molding technology, electric ignition—every element developed independently