Kazuo Inamori was born in Kagoshima, Japan, on 30 January 1932, the second eldest of seven children. He graduated in applied chemistry from Kagoshima University in 1955, and in 1959 he and several colleagues founded Kyoto Ceramic, later known as Kyocera. After Japan’s telecommunications industry was deregulated in 1984, he founded the company that became KDDI.
In 1997 he became a lay Buddhist priest at Enpukuji Temple in Kyoto. At 77 the Japanese government asked him to come out of retirement to save Japan Airlines, and he became its president when it entered bankruptcy protection in January 2010. He died on 24 August 2022.