Michael Kogan

Michael “Misha” Kogan (January 1, 1920 – February 5, 1984) was a Ukrainian Jewish businessman who founded the Japanese video game company Taito.

Michael Kogan
Майкл Коган
Born
Michaell Kogan

January 1, 1920
Odessa, Ukrainian People's Republic
DiedFebruary 5, 1984(1984-02-05) (aged 64)
Los Angeles, California, United States
OccupationBusinessman, founder of Taito
Children2

Early life

He was born in Odessa. His family moved to Harbin, Manchuria to escape the Russian Revolution of 1917, where he later met Colonel Norihiro Yasue, a member of the Japanese Army's intelligence services and one of the architects of the Fugu Plan, a plan to settle European Jewish refugees in Japanese-occupied Manchuria. He moved to Tokyo in 1939, where he spent most of the duration of the war studying at Waseda School of Economics. He moved to Tianjin in 1944 before returning to Japan in 1950, settling in Setagaya, Tokyo.

Career

Kogan established the Taito Trading Company in 1953, and it eventually became Taito Corporation. The company started out importing and distributing vending machines and then jukeboxes before evolving to manufacture their own.[1]

He died during a business trip in Los Angeles in 1984.

His son, Abba, lives in Monaco. His daughter, Rita, lived in Southern California and was married to Richard Edlund, founder of Boss Film Studios and an Academy Award-winning Visual Effects Supervisor until her death in 2019. As of 2005 she still maintained an 8.50% holding of Taito stock.[2]

gollark: Syl has been in here for quite some time, ish.
gollark: If you don't mention S[REDACTED], they are unlikely to speak.
gollark: As far as I know the networks mostly just get fed "tokens" and output "tokens".
gollark: I guess so. But this way is easier to get useful results out of without 917249817481724871471094819024 big neural networks and 912748129648912641641246182057180971207401892784901704 training.
gollark: Humans have dedicated language processing brain areas, however.

References
  1. "Taito". Retrieved 15 November 2016.
  2. http://www.square-enix.com/jp/company/e/news/2005/download/release_050926en.pdf


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