Many newswire services are reporting the death of Genichi Kawakami, son of the founder of what we know as Yamaha today. Genichi Kawakami was 90 years old and died of "old age".

Most obits report that Genichi Kawakami started Yamaha-Motor in an effort to put their propeller-making tooling to use after WWII.

You can read Yahoo's obit on Genichi Kawakami here.