Gunpei

Gunpei is a masculine Japanese given name. It is relatively uncommon in modern usage and is most widely recognized internationally due to Gunpei Yokoi, a key figure at Nintendo.

The name is typically written with the kanji characters 軍平, where 軍 means "army" or "military" and 平 means "peace" or "flat." In Japanese names, the combination is chosen for its sound and personal meaning rather than a literal phrase, and the reading "Gunpei" comes from the traditional reading of the characters used by Yokoi's family.

Notable bearer: Gunpei Yokoi (横井軍平, 1931–1997) was a Japanese engineer and game designer at Nintendo. He oversaw the development of the Game & Watch line and the Game Boy, and he contributed to the design of the D-pad on Nintendo's controllers. He also created the Ultra Hand toy and championed "lateral thinking with withered technology"—a design philosophy emphasizing using mature, reliable components to build new devices. Yokoi died in 1997 in a car accident.

Legacy: The name Gunpei is now chiefly associated with Yokoi's contributions to video game hardware and toy design, which helped shape Nintendo's hardware strategy in the 1980s and 1990s. The name remains a rarity outside biographical contexts and is primarily recognized through Yokoi’s legacy in the gaming industry.