According to the weekly women’s PRIME report, Yukawa Eiichi, who was famous for his SEGA Dreamcast commercials in the past, has died of aspiration pneumonia in 2021 at the age of 78.
Weekly Women, because of the previous SEGA advertisement, looked for Yugawa Eiichi’s situation, and visited a former subordinate.
The subordinate revealed that Yukawa Eiichi had served as the chairman of the company he opened following leaving CSK Group and QUO Card; five years ago, because of his poor health, he recuperated in his own home for a long time, and died of aspiration pneumonia in June 2021. The news of the death was not made public according to the wishes of the relatives.
As soon as the news of his death came out, Yuji Naka, who was also a former SEGA comrade-in-arms, posted a message of condolences on Twitter.
Yukawa-san had died.
I did not know. I pray for your soul.
I miss Yukawa-san because he gave me a lot of help.https://t.co/cSGMA2rvww— Yuji Naka / Yuji Naka (@nakayuji) June 6, 2022
The “Yukawa Specialist” advertisement that is as red as Dreamcast
Mr. Yukawa was the founder of CSK at the earliest. In 1998, he was assigned to SEGA as the representative of CSK and served as the full-time director and the deputy general head of the Consumer Business General Headquarters. That year, it happened that Dreamcast went public, and he also became the “Yukawa Specialist” in the advertisement.
The first battle became a classic Dreamcast advertisement. SEGA launched the “Yukawa Specialist” series with a masochistic image. The advertisement was extremely masochistic and damaged its own products, including the lines directly saying “PS is more interesting~”.
The advertisement recruited Takizawa Hideaki, who was popular at the time, to create a strong contrast with the lack of interest in Yukawa’s professional sales host. Takizawa Hideaki said, “Please see this person and say ‘specialist, please give me one'”, which caused high school girls to go crazy.
Yukawa Specialist, who became a “SEGA Signature” for a while, once had his own title product, which can only be said to be really super popular.
At the end of the series of commercials, Yukawa Specialist was burdened with Dreamcast’s lack of supply and was demoted from “Professional” to “Executive”, which caused many players to worry; however, the real-life Eiichi Yukawa was of course not affected.
Although SEGA withdrew from the console battle because of the Dreamcast loss, the classic advertisement is still deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
Finally, look once more.
Thank you, “Yukawa Specialist” ノシ
