[No. 30] Mochio Umeda

©Junya Kondo

I was educated at Keio University, starting from Yochisha, the elementary school. At Yochisha, we stayed in the same class for six years, and at Keio Futsubu School, the junior high, we also remained in the same class for three years. At Jukuko, or Keio Senior High School, classes were reorganized every year, but for some reason, my best friend since my Yochisha days, Katsuhiko Tomooka (now an associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology), and I were never in the same class throughout our twelve years of elementary, junior high, and high school.

As we both aspired to enter the Faculty of Engineering, we hatched a mischievous plan to get into the same class for once so we could have all the fun we wanted.

In our third year of high school, my second foreign language was German and Tomooka's was French. However, we both decided to apply for a recommendation to the Faculty of Engineering with Russian as our second foreign language. We figured that Russian would be unpopular and there would likely be only one class. If so, we were sure to be in the same class.

I don't have a clear memory of whether we saw the class assignments and attendance numbers on the day of the entrance ceremony or around that time. But when we saw the announcement, we became a little anxious. It was great that we were in the same class, but Tomooka's attendance number was unusually low. Whether ordered by the Japanese syllabary (his name starts with "To") or by the alphabet ("T"), Tomooka's number should normally have been quite high. But it was "7" or "8"—a single digit, in any case.

The reason became clear at our first class gathering. Tacked on at the end of the 18 classes in our grade, "Class 1-R, the Faculty of Engineering Russian class," had only 13 students. What's more, five of them had come up from Keio Shiki Senior High School because they "heard Russian was easy." Out of the 13 all-male students, more than half were "internal students who chose Russian for impure motives," making us a rather pathetic group. This was in the spring of 1979.

However, looking back now, more than 25 years later, those two years I spent with my friends from Class R in Hiyoshi were a precious, jewel-like time.

We were all always, always together. When it came to exams, we truly helped each other out. We were always finding some excuse for a drinking party, like getting together with our homeroom teacher, Professor Hayakawa (a Russian professor, of course). When my father passed away in the winter of my sophomore year of university, my friends from Class R were incredibly supportive and encouraging.

Those were happy days. But not a single one of us in Class R ever became proficient in Russian.

My dream at the time was to stay at Keio and become a university professor. But with my father's death when I was 20, a series of coincidences led me to turn to the world of business instead of pursuing the path of academia.

Then, in 1994, I left Japan and came to Silicon Valley. I founded a consulting firm in Silicon Valley in 1997 and a venture capital firm in 2000, which brings me to the present. Since graduating from university, I've been running frantically and never had a chance to get together with my old friends.

By the way, the opportunity to write these reminiscences for this column was also brought about by one of my Class R friends, Tetsushi Harada (now at JFE Steel Corporation). Harada suggested to Professor Tatsuo Sawada, who is in charge of this column, "Why not have Umeda write something?"

I received a request from Professor Sawada to "please write freely about your memories from your university days." I thought about what to write, but in the end, I could only think of Class R. When I think of my memories of the Faculty of Engineering, they almost completely overlap with my memories of Class R.

This must also be some kind of fate. I hope we, the members of Class R, can all get together again soon.