Gen Fukunaga

Gen Fukunaga (ゲン・フクナガ) is a Japanese-born businessman and producer who is the founder and president of Funimation Entertainment, a company that distributes anime in the United States and Canada.

Fukunaga was born in Japan and grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana in the United States. He graduated from West Lafayette High School in 1979.

Fukunaga attended Purdue University and moved to Boca Raton, Florida to work for IBM. But he decided to go for a management-based career, so he went to Columbia University to get an MBA. He held a position with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) before getting a job with Tandem Computers in Sunnyvale, California.

Fukunaga's uncle was one of the producers for Dragon Ball, he approached Gen about bringing the series over to America. If Fukunaga could start a company and raise enough money, Toei Animation would license the rights to the show. So Gen went to a coworker named Daniel Cocanougher whose family owned a feed mill in Decatur, Texas and convinced the Cocanougher family to sell their business and invest in creating a production company. With that, FUNimation was established in 1994.

Currently, Fukunaga lives in Roanoke, Texas, with his wife Cindy Brennan (a producer at Funimation), and their three children.

External links

• Purdue's biography on Gen Fukunaga
• Gen Fukunaga at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
• Gen Fukunaga at the Internet Movie Database