Kontetsu
One more post related to the greater Berkeley/Haas family. The Honorable Tetsuo Kondo, former Minister of Labor of Japan and long-time pillar of the UC-Berkeley community, passed away at the age of 80 last week due to pancreatic cancer. Kondo was perhaps best-known stateside as Japan’s counterpart to Robert Reich during his tenure as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration.
Mr Kondo was a mentor, counselor, sounding board and friend to many. I last saw him in November of last year, when I paid a visit to his office. We chatted about politics in the US and Japan, and about his son, Yosuke Kondo, now a rising star in the DPJ, Japan’s ruling party. (Yosuke Kondo recently received a glowing write-up in the Economist.)
I first made Mr. Kondo’s acquaintance in 2001. While working on my thesis on Startup Entrepreneurship in Japan (based on the framework described by Annalee Saxenian in Regional Advantage) he both arranged and accompanied me to an interview with the founding CEO and then-Chairman of NTT DoCoMo, Koji Oboshi, who spoke about DoCoMo’s spinout from NTT and its relatively humble beginnings in the carphone market. (Suffice it to say my thesis ended up being a rather untypical Master’s thesis.)
From that point on, Mr Kondo was both friend, counselor and mentor, and incredibly generous with his time. To the end, his door was open, and I take that as great inspiration.