VII. Mitsui: The Dynast

CHAPTER VII

Mitsui

THE DYNAST

IN THE PRIVATE museum of the Mitsui family in Tokyo there is preserved an ancient sign. It is the sign which hung over the first Yedo store of that Mitsui who founded the family commercial empire. It was hung out in 1673. It reads: CASH PAYMENTS AND A SINGLE PRICE. Two hundred and fifty years before Woolworth and, for that matter, a hundred years before that London Bridge draper for whom Robert Owen worked, there in ancient Tokyo was a cash-and-carry, one-price store in the bickering, bargaining Orient.

This was the store of Hachirobei Mitsui. He began his career as a boy of fourteen in a little Tokyo shop. He ended as the leading merchant in the Japan of his day. He must have been a merchant of unusual talents. For in that distant day and in that uncommercial world, he is credited with having introduced a group of mercantile innovations that American business-office essayists are fond of extolling as the peculiar fruit of the McKinley-Coolidge cycle.

He opened branch stores, at least six of them, before he died. He established his own central warehouse. He inaugurated profit sharing among his higher employees. He housed his employees in large, airy dormitories, carefully supervised them, and introduced several hygienic regulations. He used double-entry bookkeeping. More surprising, he was a pioneer in advertising. On rainy days his spacious store in Suruga-cho, Tokyo, would lend to customers umbrellas flaunting on their roofs the name of Mitsui. He used billposters proclaiming the name of Mitsui in large block letters. He subsidized producers, playwrights, and actors to work the Mitsui name and store into the lines of the picaresque dramas so popular in that day, thus becoming a sponsor and by two hundred and fifty years anticipating the radio “commercial” of today.

Bettmann Archives

HACHIROBEI MITSUI AND HIS WIFE

These striking similarities in the commercial devices of Japan and Europe—cut off from each other by Japan’s guarded isolation and the length of two continents—were not the only points of resemblance. When Hachirobei Mitsui opened his first small store Japan had a feudal society. And the rise of that society, its evolving pattern, its disasters and disorders, and its changing forms paralleled closely the origin, rise, development, and disintegration of feudalism in Germany and France. Thus men, pursued by the same fears and needs and crowded by the same pressures, hit upon the same escapes, yield to the same messiahs, embrace the same panaceas. The desperate Nipponese in flight from economic distress and bewilderment follows much the same economic road as the desperate Teuton or Briton—from despotism to feudalism, to guilds, to the money economy, to the dominion of the merchant, the entrance of money, the struggle between central power and feudal estate, until finally the two-sworded lord who had not a yen to his name had to fall back before the million-yenned merchant who had not a sword to his name, and needed none.

The Mitsuis, according to the family’s own account, belonged to the “middle-class feudal gentry” and traced their ancestry to a statesman of the seventh century named Kamatari Fugiwara. One of his descendants settled in Omi province and took the name of Mitsui which means literally “three wells.” The name is associated with some dim legend of how that first ancestor found fortune in three wells upon his arrival in Japan—presumably from heaven. There, though noble, the family became a vassal of the powerful Sasaki clan. And around the middle of the fifteenth century a son of the Sasaki clan was adopted by the Mitsuis. Probably virility was running low and this youth, Takahisa Sasaki, was brought in for glandular reasons. He built a formidable castle on the shores of Lake Biwa in Namazue, became a leader of the Sasaki clan, and was known as the Lord of Echigo.

This feudal society, like that of thirteenth-century Germany, let us say, was split up into a number of estates or baronies—little economic islets secluded from the rest of the world. Over these baronies presided a lord, who was called a daimio. He owned the barony and wielded the power of life and death over its people. Between these baronial islets little or no trade flowed. Instances are on record of men dying of hunger in one daimio’s demesne while in the neighboring estate the land overflowed with Japanese abundance.

Over all was an emperor who was a deity and a name, but with no real power. The power was in the hands of a Shogun, but not in that absolute way in which the later Shoguns exercised it. It was quite futile against the local despotism of the daimio. And as regards central power, whatever central power the Shogun had was operated by first one and then another group of daimios who shouldered around that dignitary and dominated his functions.

Some of these daimios were very wealthy. Mayeda, the Lord of Kaga, is reported to have had an income of a million koku of rice a year (a koku had the value of about a pound). Others—a large number—had incomes of 10,000 or more koku of rice. Many were just small plantation owners. The Mitsuis in Omi were daimios and, after their alliance with the Sasaki clan, wealthy.

Then in the latter part of the sixteenth century there arose one of the great figures of Japanese history—Oda Nobunaga, a kind of Oriental combination of Louis XI and Garibaldi, an able warrior who set out to bring Japan under a strong central government. Nobunaga declared war upon the weak Ashikaga Shogunate. In his path to Kyoto lay the demesne of the Lord of Echigo—the Daimio Takayasu Mitsui (son of Takahisa). He was no match for the doughty Nobunaga who was bowling over the recalcitrant barons with regularity as he moved on Kyoto. He destroyed Mitsui’s castle, drove him and his family from their demesne, and ultimately made himself the master of Japan. His work was completed and consolidated by two other figures scarcely less important than himself—his successors, Hydeyoshi and Ieyasu. The latter installed himself as Shogun and became the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled Japan for two hundred and fifty years during the long seclusion era that preceded the arrival of Admiral Perry.

As for Takayasu Mitsui, the dispossessed Lord of Echigo, he fled with his family to Ise province, probably as insolvent as a Russian duke after Lenin. He was disgusted with arms and war. He resolved never again to use the two swords which were the mark of his rank. His son and successor, Sokubei Mitsui, was a peace-loving soul from whose spirit every last drop of romantic samurai nonsense about the heroism of arms had been drained. It was this Sokubei who decided to throw away his two swords and to enter the merchant class.

The plunge from noble to trader was a steep one. In this land of caste, the court families occupied the top rank. Wasters and idlers, they lived in Kyoto, without estates or incomes, around the emperors, supported wholly by pensions from the state. Next in order were the daimios, or feudal barons. Then came the samurai, the gentlemen who monopolized the military functions of the society and supposed themselves alone to be fitted to fight battles, until the peasant armies of the emperor after his restoration chased the heaven-chartered warriors of the Satsuma clan into speedy submission. They lived upon the estates and served as the warrior knights of the daimios. And in the two hundred and fifty years of peace after Ieyasu, they were a wholly unprofitable charge upon the country. Below them were the farmers. The next layer were the artisans and below them the merchants, only a step above the handlers of dead bodies—the slaughterers, skinners, tanners, undertakers. It was down through this six-storied social structure that Sokubei plunged almost into the basement. “With remarkable fortitude,” says the Mitsui chronicle, “Sokubei abandoned his own class and enlisted on a commercial career as a brewer of sake.” Sokubei’s fortitude was doubtless reinforced by his appetite, like the aristocratic émigrés of Russia who turned up as headwaiters and couturiers in New York and London. He had left only his two swords. The revenues of his rank were gone. Ieyasu Tokugawa had them. There wasn’t much else for Sokubei to do.

He married Shuho, daughter of a tradesman. She is today more famed in the family annals than he. She was a sort of Japanese Hetty Green, a yen pincher and born bargainer. Sokubei became a brewer, which means he set up a little shop and made sake and shoyu from the soybean. The redoubtable Shuho opened a little bar with a pawnshop attached, an excellent combination, each department fattening upon the other. Sokubei died in 1633. But Shuho, his widow, survived him forty-seven years, ruled her small shop and her family with an iron hand, and died at the age of eighty-seven.

When Ieyasu Tokugawa became Shogun he established his capital at Edo, a small, almost negligible village, later called Yedo and now the six-million-peopled metropolis of Tokyo. The new Shogun built an imposing, rambling, fortified castle expressing the might of his rule. The new capital quickly attracted numbers of people, and Ieyasu invited merchants to come to Yedo and make a market. Curiously it was the men of Ise province who went in numbers and almost usurped the trade of the new town. Among these was Saburozaemon, the oldest son of Sokubei. He opened a small drygoods store. When his youngest brother, Hachirobei, was fourteen, his mother sent him to Yedo to learn his trade in the shop of Saburozaemon.

There Hachirobei remained fourteen years. When he was twenty-eight he retired to his native Matsuzaka and set up as a moneylender on his own account. Matsuzaka was a small town, and how much Hachirobei prospered is not reported. But he remained there until he was fifty-two years old. Then he moved to Kyoto, the home of the emperor, and established a drygoods store. This was in 1673. And there this Hachirobei laid the foundation of the Mitsui fortune. The Mitsui family in celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the formation of their commercial house chose Sokubei’s shop opening as the date. In a sense this was historically correct. But Sokubei was a mere village alky cooker and tavern-keeper. The brother Saburozaemon seems to vanish quickly from all the old chronicles. It is Hachirobei who is really credited by the Mitsuis as the founder of their commercial structure.

After thirteen years of progress in Kyoto, Hachirobei opened a drygoods store in Yedo, which was now expanding as the new capital. There he put his famous sign—CASH PAYMENTS AND A SINGLE PRICE. The store grew; warehouse after warehouse was added until the store occupied a large space on both sides of the street Suruga-cho and employed many hundreds of clerks. It remained there, operated by the Mitsuis, until 1904. Then the Mitsui firm parted with it and it has since been owned by a separate corporation called Mitsukoshi, the largest department store east of Suez and in precisely the same spot in Suruga-cho as that first store. At first the store traded in silks and other textiles, the brocades of Nishyin being one of its specialties. But gradually other articles of merchandise were added. In 1708 we find it establishing buying agents at Nagasaki to buy woolens, tortoise-shell ware, sugar, chemicals from Dutch ships.

Man is a groping animal. He feels his way bungling, one step at a time. And it is an extraordinary observation upon his development in the commercial world that almost everywhere he has followed the same steps. The scenes, the costumes, the manners, the cast of characters differ in different countries. But men in the seventeenth century were turning with surprising inevitability to the same financial and commercial devices in Japan as their distant and unknown brethren in the Germany of Maximilian and the France of Francis I, getting into the same holes and out of them by the same devices and into still other, but similar holes. I have no doubt that, if one day we explore the moon and find it inhabited by men like ourselves, we shall find they have invented stores and money, bills of exchange, promissory notes, banks, double-entry bookkeeping, debasement of the coinage, national debts to keep the moon’s economy afloat, corporations and brokers and all the paraphernalia of the earth’s economic life.

The unit of production was the estate of the daimio. He collected from his vassals and feudal tenants his share of the produce in rice. The rice was sent to Osaka to be exchanged for money or for other goods. The daimio consigned his rice to a broker—a kakeya—who offered it publicly and sold it to the highest bidder. In time these brokers formed an exchange. The buyer of rice was required to pay ten per cent down and the balance in ten days. The broker himself remitted the money to his client monthly. Thus he got the use of it for thirty days without interest and could do a kind of banking business. The buyer of the rice did not have to accept delivery immediately. Great warehouses were built and warehouse receipts were issued against the rice. After a while the buyer could pay his ten per cent down and borrow the balance from a broker or other moneylender, giving the warehouse receipt for security. And thus he could speculate in rice futures. A brisk trade sprang up on the exchange in these rice futures. And thus there developed in Japan a system of marketing rice like that in vogue in the cotton market in New Orleans and the wheat pit in Chicago. Indeed, in time the speculation became so wild, so violent, so upsetting to lenders, daimios, and buyers generally that a great scandal ensued. The government stepped in, instituted an investigation, prosecuted many brokers, executed several, reorganized the exchange, abolished margin trading, licensed brokers, and subjected the whole business to government supervision.

Hachirobei Mitsui opened a bank in or next to his store in Yedo and there became a lender of money and, perhaps, accepted deposits. The evidence on this latter point, however, is a little unsatisfactory. But he did become a kakeya, represented a number of daimios, indeed was the broker for several whole provinces. This business gave him an insight into the possibilities of profit in the handling of other people’s money. And sometime around 1690 he conceived an idea that men had already experimented with in Europe.

The Shogun collected no taxes in money. All was paid in rice. Each district had a minor deputy known as a daikan who collected rice from the daimios. He shipped it to Osaka and sold it for gold or silver. The metal he sent to Yedo to the Shogun’s treasury. This was an expensive trip requiring many coolies, packing, and great danger of loss on the roads infested by brigands. Hachirobei had stores in Kyoto, Yedo, and Osaka. He went to the Shogun’s officials and proposed that he contract to deliver the gold or silver in Yedo within sixty days without cost. He planned to have the gold turned over to him by the governor of Osaka. He could then buy goods with it, ship the goods to Yedo in fifteen days, sell them for cash within the sixty days, and deliver to the treasury funds collected right in Yedo, thus doing away with the need for so much transportation of metal. The officials approved his plan and later extended the period for delivery to one hundred and fifty days. Hachirobei then had a continuous flow of Shogunate funds pouring into his possession and open to his use for exploitation for five months. In other words, he got a five-month whack at the use of the government’s taxes before he was required to deliver them up in Yedo.

This became the basis for the use of the bill of exchange in Japan, although singularly Hachirobei did not apparently take this next step. Other merchants saw that the same method could be applied to the transport of money for commercial as well as government purposes. There was a flow of payments from Osaka to the government at Yedo. But there was also a flow of payments from Yedo merchants to Osaka merchants. Brokers in Osaka found that they could collect money in Osaka and make delivery of metal to a creditor in Yedo without actually shipping silver save occasionally, by balancing credits in the two cities against each other.

After the Tokugawa Shogunate got under way that powerful social chemical—money—began its slow work. Very little at a time, but very surely, the old feudal system began to lose its vitality, indeed to lose its way. Little by little the money system and all that went with it—the capitalist system—began to trickle over Japanese society.

Gold and silver coins had begun to circulate around 1429—in the Muromachi period. Goto Mitsutsugu began to buy placer gold and gold bars and to mint them into coins. Daikakuya minted silver into coins about the same time. Both grew rich. Some others followed suit. Also Chinese copper coins circulated freely. But when Oda Nobunaga rose to power he put an end to the nondescript and miscellaneous issuance and circulation of coins and conferred upon Mitsutsugu and Daikakuya the monopoly privilege of coining gold and silver respectively, so that these men became among the richest in Japan. As in Europe, men who had goods or services to sell preferred to be paid in money. Money began to have an agio, or preference, over rice. By the middle of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a Japanese philosopher wrote:

The possession of gold and silver means wealth. The foolish are held to be wise and the wicked good if only they are possessed of gold and silver. On the contrary one who has neither gold nor silver is held to be poor. However wise he may be he is dubbed a fool. A clever man with no money is regarded by the public as a dullard. And a good man so circumstanced is looked upon as a worthless person. As all things, life or death, success or failure, depend upon the possession of gold, all people irrespective of rank run after gold as the first requisite of existence.

Japan was a country of about 2 6 million workers, a few hundred thousand samurai, and a handful of daimios. The daimio, to be sure, performed a function. He was the agrarian entrepreneur. He managed the economic producing unit—the estate or barony or plantation. The wretched farmers under the daimios were levied upon “so that they should neither die nor live.”¹ All above what was necessary to the most meager subsistence of the workers was taken by the daimio as his share. He used that to get the things he wished by barter and translated as much as possible into money. The Lord of Kaga had an income of over a million koku, which seems large. But he operated a barony with a population of 586,000 souls and he had to maintain not merely the economic machinery of this vast estate but supply all the functions of a highly independent local government as well. There were about forty-five daimios with incomes of 100,000 koku or over and 195 with incomes of 10,000 koku or more. There were many whose incomes were so small as to be unimportant.

But the samurai rendered literally no service whatever. He was a professional warrior with no battles to fight during the long Shogunate peace. He assumed a heaven-sent charter as soldier. Yet in the many agrarian revolts during the Shogunate against individuals and groups of daimios, the revolts were frequently successful. The divinely appointed warriors, encased in magnificent armor, fled swiftly to the castle and sent out envoys to negotiate peace. There were 350,000 of these parasites, each equipped with three hereditary servants who had also to be supported. They made up a swarm of over a million who toiled not, spun not, but lived upon hereditary, stipulated revenues paid them by the daimio out of the produce of the estate. As they were persons of exquisite fancy and cultivated appetites, they were among the first to discover the potency of coins to purchase the things they liked. And as gold, silver, and copper became more and more the coin of the growing cities and as daimios and samurai sought more and more to translate all their income into coin and as the merchants and bankers invented new ways to increase the amount of gold actually and potentially by increasing its velocity through credits and bills of exchange and clearances, money came more and more to dominate the daily operations of the walled-in island.

Inevitably this began to increase the importance of the merchants who were gradually accumulating all the money, for the daimios got hold of it only to spend it again with the merchants and bankers. It began to trouble the daimios and samurai who became borrowers, who learned how to spend this year the income of next year and to add to the other burdens of administration the burden of interest.

Some of these were thrifty gentlemen who knew how to adjust themselves to the new order of things. Thus it is recorded that the daimio Tsushima, who had a small barony with an income of only 20,000 koku, bought Korean ginseng and other articles at low prices, sold them at a good profit, and was better off than a daimio with 200,000 koku. In short, the noble gentleman became in effect a merchant. The daimio of Matsumae with an income of only 7000 koku sold the products of his own and another fief—Ezo—and lived equally to a daimio with an income of 50,000 koku, while another, Tsuwano, with 40,000 koku, turned manufacturer and made pasteboard, with a resulting income of 150,000 koku.

But many of the daimios went from debt to debt, living in a state of continual emergency. Samurai were most severely hit. For they were continually borrowing from the town moneylenders, pledging as security their stipends from the daimios. Ultimately they became hopelessly and helplessly involved in debt and reduced to a state of grave poverty. Many of them drifted into the towns and turned to manual chores for a living, while others, putting the high ethics of the knight under foot, turned to such forms of graft as their special and various connections made possible.

In this way the claims upon the income of the nation were being reshuffled. Before plowing and harvesting time came around, the daimio had a claim upon the product of the labor of every workman or feudal tenant who lived upon his land. The samurai had a claim upon a part of the daimio’s share. And the government had a claim upon both. But now the merchant moneylender—the lowly chonin—was establishing claims upon the income of the daimio and the samurai who owed them money. And slowly the money supplies of the country were being drained off into the hands of these traders and moneylenders through the processes of interest and profit. The samurai were being ruined, many of them declassed. The daimios—most of them—were being impoverished. The workers beneath them all were being driven to desperation by the taxes and other exactions wrung from the fruits of their labor. The merchants were becoming wealthy. The Mitsui family was expanding. It had six branch stores, the largest at Yedo, before Hachirobei died. It was in every form of moneylending and handling.

But there were others richer than Mitsui. In Yedo were the wealthy and ornate Messrs. Kinokuniya-Bunzaemon and Naraya-Mozaemon, fabulously rich by the standards of the times and exhibiting their wealth in the most ostentatious manner. At Kyoto was the nouveau riche Naniwaya-Juemon, who is said to have made the people gape at his splendid residences, his gardens, his dinners, his raiment. Richest of all was the leading rice broker, the great kakeya—the J. Pierpont Morgan of Japan—Yodoya Saburoemon, whose new palace and fresh magnificence seemed almost imperial. He put on such a show that the Shogun confiscated all his property. What was gathered in this seizure gives an idea of what the possessions of a wealthy Osakan or Yedoan consisted. The bailiffs seized fifty pairs of gold screens, three toy ships made of jewelry, 360 carpets, 10,500 kin of liquid gold, 273 large precious stones and countless small ones, two chests of gold, 3000 large gold coins, 120,000 ryo of koban, 85,000 kwamme of silver, 75,000 kwamme of copper money, 150 boats, 730 storehouses, 12 storehouses of jewelry, 80 granaries, 80 storehouses of beans, 28 houses in Osaka, 64 in other places, claim to the rice stipend of one daimio amounting to 332 koku, and 150 chobu of cypress forest.

How large the houses, how roomy the storehouses, we do not know. But here was a considerable accumulation in a new regime and in a new economy.

These Park Avenue Osaka and Kyoto and Yedo exhibitionists brought down upon their heads the wrath of the Shogun because he deemed them to be disturbing to society. Disturbing indeed! These upstarts, freshly risen from the dung heap, who were compelled to kneel in the street as their bankrupt debtors passed them; these despised traders, class neighbors of the animal skinner and the gravediggers, to be giving themselves the airs of court nobles! It would be difficult to keep the starving artisan and the slaving farmer feeling himself the superior of these men in brocades. It upset completely the class arrangement. Therefore they must be reduced to their proper level, at least in appearance. Hence they were forbidden to indulge in displays. Then to add a touch of logic to the rule, they must be stripped of some of their wealth at least, by taxes, by confiscations, by goyokin—forced loans upon merchants—by currency devaluations, since thus funds were provided for their impecunious superiors. The debts of samurai were canceled at intervals.

In addition to these reactions upon the trader groups from the woes of the bewildered agrarian nobles, the cities were developing their own troubles. The various producing groups, in this land of scarcity, feared they were the helpless victims of competition and overproduction. They sought monopolies. And the Shoguns, hard-pressed for cash, granted them for a consideration. Traders, brokers, merchants formed themselves into associations to monopolize their trades. That is, guilds grew up in the towns. The fisherman coming home with his catch and the merchant to whom he sold it found themselves beset by all the real and imagined evils of competition.

An apostle of self-rule in business named Sukegoro of Yamato appeared with his cure. He formed the fishmongers into a trade association. He set up a code of practice. He enrolled 391 wholesalers and 246 brokers in his corporative code authority. It was a scheme to protect the middleman. The fisherman bought his boat and supplies and got credit from the wholesaler or broker and in return gave him exclusive right to his catch. The association fixed the prices the fisherman received. The wholesaler sold only to the retailer. The consumer could not buy from the fisherman or the wholesaler. Sukegoro built preserves to keep the fish alive until the market was ready for them. He did under the authority of the government what fishermen have many times sought to do in New York under the sponsorship and enforcement machinery of gangsters and what all sorts of producers attempted under authority of the NRA; what the building trades do in defiance of law. The excess production was kept off the market. The price was kept up. The number of competitors was kept down. Other trades were similarly organized. There were jurisdictional disputes between craftsmen. The sawyers complained that the carpenters were sawing up too much of the lumber in buildings at the job site. The Shogun sought continuously, by subsidies, by warehousing the surplus, by price decrees, to keep up the price of rice to protect the daimio whose staple was rice.

Apparently the Mitsuis steered as far as they were able out of these trade agreements. They seem to have contrived in every way open to them to evade these monopolistic arrangements, to buy in as large quantities as possible, and through efficient management to sell at lower prices in the interest of larger volume. Named as one of the ten bankmen to control the money market, they appear to have shied away from that combination.

Above all, under the direction of Hachirobei, as their moneylending affairs grew, the Mitsui house refused to lend money to the nobles—to court nobles, daimios, or samurai. They sought in every way to keep their finances extricated from the shaky finances of the ruling class. Hachirobei lectured his sons about this ceaselessly. The house was rewarded with immunity, therefore, from the disasters that in all ages have descended sooner or later upon the banking houses that became the creditors of princes. They escaped the fate of the Bardi and the Peruzzi of Italy, and eventually the Fuggers in Germany, and of the Mendelssohns in our own time. Takafusa Mitsui, in a manuscript containing his recollection of the observations of his father Hachirobei, records this advice to merchants:

Only a fool would believe that the feudal lords would permit the merchant to make unreasonable profit. These lords promise to send their rice to the merchant in Osaka, and on that security borrow money in advance. For the first year or two they appear to be willing to deposit more and more money with the merchants. Never will they pay back their debts by sending the promised amounts, but sending their rice to another quarter where they expect accommodation, they refuse the payment to the merchants from whom they already borrowed large sums.

Through these stratagems and through the bankruptcy of the lords innumerable merchants were ruined. Takafusa records the names of forty-eight merchants in Yedo alone who were wiped out through their unfortunate loans to the nobles. Of all the many houses of that day the House of Mitsui and the House of Kenoike alone survive to the present.

Hachirobei died in 1694. Before he died he had apparently meditated much upon the possible dissipation of his fortune. He had seen the solid substance of the great daimios melt away. He had seen rich merchants ruined. He saw the erosive power of successions to numerous heirs. In the Chonin Koku Roku, a manuscript privately circulated by his son, he is reported to have observed that “great fortunes will develop symptoms of decline when they reach the third generation.” It was natural that in his world, where the family played so important a part, he should seek to devise some means of preventing the dispersion of his fortune. He therefore contrived to organize his business in the form of a family corporation. He had six sons—one in charge of each of the six branches. He established six family groups and allotted to each a proportion of the inheritance. But the inheritance—that is the business itself and the fortune—were to remain intact. A son might manage in each branch, but all the branches belonged to the family. The profits belonged to the business, and the family was to determine what each member of the family should receive as his share in any season. His will outlined a code of family ethics and a procedure of management. After his death his oldest son, Takahisa Mitsui, who succeeded as head of the house, reduced his precepts to a code which still governs the family. It follows:

1. The members of the House should deal with one another in close friendship and with kindness. Beware that contentions among the kin would in the end ruin the entire House.

2. Do not needlessly increase the number of families of the House. Everything has its limits. Know that overexpansion, which you may covet, will beget confusion and trouble.

3. Thrift enriches the House, while luxury ruins a man. Practice the former but avoid the latter. Thus lay a lasting foundation for the prosperity and perpetuation of our House.

4. In making marriages, incurring debts or underwriting others’ debts, act always according to the advice of the Council of the Family.

5. Set aside a certain part of the annual income and divide it among the members of the House according to their portions.

6. The lifework of a man lasts as long as he lives. Therefore, do not, without reason, seek the luxury and ease of retirement.

7. Cause to be sent for auditing to the main office the financial reports from all branch houses; organize your finance and prevent disintegration.

8. The essential of a business enterprise is to employ men of great abilities and take advantage of their special talents. Replace those who are aged and decrepit with young men of promise.

9. Unless one concentrates, one fails. Our House has its own enterprises which are ample to provide for any man’s life. Never touch another business.

10. He who does not know, cannot lead. Make your sons begin with the mean tasks of the apprentice, and, when they have gradually learned the secrets of the business, let them take a post in the branch houses to practice their knowledge.

11. Sound judgment is essential in all things, especially in business enterprises. Know that a small sacrifice today is preferable to a great loss tomorrow.

12. The members of the House should practice mutual caution and counsel lest they blunder. If there be among you any evildoer, deal with him accordingly at the Council of the Family.

13. You who have been born in the land of gods, worship your gods, revere your Emperor, love your country and do your duty as subjects.

Hachirobei saw that if successions could work dispersion and finally extinction of a fortune, holding intact the fortune through the years, accumulating its profits—plowing them back, in modern parlance—and uniting the combined wealth of an ever-growing number of heirs in a single continuing enterprise would progressively expand the fortune. This is what he attempted to do. Many great fortune builders have sought to do the same thing—the Medici, the Fuggers, the Rothschilds, and Cornelius Vanderbilt in our own time. But the Mitsuis succeeded where others failed.

The family has continued to be merely stockholders in a vast central enterprise. The enterprise, with its own special identity apart from the family, has grown in wealth and power until today it is one of the most potent commercial instruments in the world.

It was perhaps easier in Japan, with its strong national and religious emphasis upon the family and its long isolation in a feudal society, to keep alive this cohesive family enterprise. The family has been made, in accordance with the plan of old Hachirobei, a living, continuing, sacred institution. Each Mitsui, on coming of age, is required to take the following oath:

In obedience to the precepts of our father and in order to strengthen the everlasting foundation of our House and to expand the enterprise bequeathed by our forefathers, I solemnly vow in the presence of the August Spirits of our ancestors, that as a member of the House of Mitsui, I will serve and follow the regulations handed down in the Constitution of our House, and that I will not wantonly seek to alter them. In witness whereof, I take the oath and affix my signature thereto in the presence of the August Spirits of our ancestors.

Because of the laws in Japan, where it is apparently possible to entail a fortune, the family, organized and acting like a state through recognized and all-powerful representatives, can enforce this oath, since it controls the combined and concentrated wealth of the family and the income of each member. The youthful neophyte finds that he preserves his fealty to the family, to the august spirits of his ancestors and his dividend check, all in the same act of faith.

In 1858, after Japan had abandoned her seclusion policy, the Emperor was restored to power over the Shogun, and the new era in Japan began. By this time the Mitsui family had become one of the three richest families in Japan. What this means we can only guess. There is a good deal of easy use of large figures in describing the wealth of old barons and the magnificence of princes, but it is difficult to avoid a pinch of salt as seasoning for these statistics. When one reads that upon his accession to power the Emperor sent for the three leading banker-merchants and borrowed 1000 ryo each from them—the ryo being similar to, if not the same as, the yen—we catch a glimpse of the very diminutive figures in which they spoke.

For two hundred years, since that first little moneylending shop in Matsuzaka, the family had been, by persistent accretion and ruthless limitation upon withdrawals, creating a large bolus of wealth. It had, because of its inflexible policy, escaped the great losses that resulted from numerous debt repudiations by the barons. It must, of course, have suffered from the many ryo devaluations. It must also have been subjected to many troubled nights and suffered losses through its association with the finances of the Shogun’s government. But apparently it found a means of steering amid the shoals and rocks of Shogunate finance.

But in the end the Mitsuis became weary of the tottering Shogunate. The Shogun lost his power and the Emperor regained his because the old social fabric of the feudal era had drifted upon evil days. It was hopelessly entangled in debt. The government itself was trapped in endless financial difficulties. The clash of energies between the old feudalism of the barons and the new money economy of the merchants was tearing the economic system apart. The barons had grown tired of it because, for reasons they did not understand, the wealth of the nation was passing into the hands of the lords of Main Street. The merchants were sick of it because they were the ready-to-hand victims of the bewildered Shogun’s soak-the-rich policy. The government had to find funds to salvage failing daimios, to help the drifting samurai warriors, to appease the continually revolting farmers and the occasional town mobs. It taxed until the tax limit was reached; then it borrowed. Behold a treasury statement for the year 1830:

Expenditures	1,453,209 ryo
Revenues	925,099
Deficit	528,110 ryo

One finds this budget balanced by an item called “special revenue,” which meant the profit on devaluing the currency. In the records of that Shogunate the deficit was increasing every year. Every year the budget was balanced by the device of devaluing the currency. In ten years the government created for itself 7,558,000 ryo of “special revenue” by devaluing the currency. There should be nothing unfamiliar in this picture for the American, Briton, Frenchman, German, or Italian of today.

When, after Admiral Perry landed in Japan with his fleet of United States ships and opened Japan to the world, the merchants, barons, farmers who bore most of the burden of this disintegrating regime, were happy to see it vanish. The Shogunate capitulated without a struggle and the Emperor went from Kyoto to Yedo, henceforth called Tokyo, to assume the government of the nation. When he went, Saburosuke Mitsui, then head of the family, went along with him as treasurer.

The new era meant opportunity upon a vast scale for the Mitsuis and for those who had the means of perceiving precisely what it was all about. For now feudalism was to be replaced almost in a trice by capitalism. It was almost as if the curtain were rung down upon one act and lifted presently upon another. Japan was to leap forward over a gulf that it had taken France, Germany, and England three centuries to traverse. It was a dizzy plunge from the Holy Roman Empire of Maximilian to the Germany of Bismarck in a few brief years.

The age of long, slow accretions had ended as far as the Mitsuis were concerned. Now they were to see what could be done with coins when they were really put in motion. Japan, exposed to the new capitalist world, yielded to the infection as to some savage and swift organism. All of a sudden she needed everything, all the highly developed instrumentalities of the capitalist world—machinery, corporations, modern deposit banks, banks of issue, the refinements of credit. Above all she needed capital. The opportunities were unlimited for those who were able to see. The Mitsuis sent a mission of five younger Mitsuis abroad to inspect this new world and its money-making inventions. They returned to Japan knowing what they should do among their twenty-six million countrymen who knew nothing of the wonders of the outer world.

When the new Emperor Mutsuhito—to be known as Meiji—found himself in power, he found himself also without funds. He summoned Saburosuke Mitsui, Ono-Zensuke, and Shimada Hachirozaemon and made a modest touch of a thousand ryo each. Later he repeated this favor. But this was chicken feed, as he soon found. He sent for the three leading Main Street merchants and money men and told them to prepare a list of a hundred merchants. The Emperor summoned these gentlemen and told them plainly that he needed three million ryo. Mitsui, Ono, and Shimada were called on to underwrite the loan. The money was forthcoming. Capitalism was marching on.

They were well rewarded. Mitsui, Ono, and Shimada were made exchequer agents of the crown. They collected all taxes and held possession of them for a while before remitting to the treasury. A Mitsui man was made director of the mint. Another was made head of the bureau of specie and currency and another governor of the bureau of commercial law.

After a while it became apparent that what the new Japan needed was a modern bank. The Emperor’s finance minister, Inouye, whispered to the Mitsuis that they should organize one. It was then 1872. They sent their mission to America. After some difficulties and disappointments they opened for business their own bank, now known as the Mitsui Bank, Ltd. They had been a little embarrassed by a sort of enforced association with Ono and Shimada in another bank in the exchequer business. But a favorable circumstance in 1874 relieved them of that embarrassment. There was a brief recession in Japan. The three houses had been enjoying a boom. They collected the tax moneys of the Emperor. They held them on deposit. Rumors got around that these deposits were endangered. The finance minister called upon the three houses to produce the government funds. Ono and Shimada could not do it. Mitsui, by a tremendous effort, did. The other two houses were ruined, and the field was left clear to Mitsui. Then they launched their own bank and established thirty-one branches in Japan. Thus the Mitsuis extended thirty-one arms into all the corners of Japan and proceeded to draw in funds from every section. The bank grew swiftly. It had a capital of two million yen in 1876 and deposits of 11,369,000 yen. In 1932 it had a capital of 60 million yen and 687 million in deposits. It is and has been the core of the Mitsui development. Like those bank affiliates in America in the nineteen twenties, this reservoir of funds and creator of bank money drew into its treasury the savings of countless thousands that the Mitsuis could use to finance their numerous adventures.

Then came that proliferation of enterprises that characterizes the family today. With unlimited money resources open to them through their bank and their possession of government funds they began slowly to reach out in every direction, to tap all the new sources of profit. Inouye, finance minister in Ito’s cabinet, left the ministry a rich man and set up a trading company called Senshu Kaisha to handle foreign trade. It prospered abundantly. The Mitsuis too, in 1875, organized a small company called Kokusan Kata (National Products Company). When Inouye went back to the cabinet in 1876 the Mitsuis took over his Senshu Kaisha, combined it with their Kokusan Kata, and organized a new concern called the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. This became the holding company of numerous enterprises and is today the agency through which the Mitsui family carries on its great domestic and foreign commercial adventures.

When the Meiji ministry got down to business after the restoration, it began to encourage and to organize modern industries. The government owned the Oji Paper Works. It built a model silk mill. It organized and developed the Shibaura Engineering Works. It built the Kanegafuchi cotton mills. It owned the Miike mines—the richest coal treasure in Japan. After a while the Mitsuis began as tenderly and quietly as possible to lift these off the government’s hands, buying out on the most favorable terms. Thus it went into silk manufacture, imported silkworms from Italy, taught the peasants more modern methods of silk culture, and ultimately made itself the largest factor in the world silk industry. They took over the Oji paper business in 1872. Today the Oji Manufacturing Company controls about sixteen corporations which own forests, sawmills, paper-manufacturing companies, power companies, railways, security companies, and a newspaper—the Mainichi—in Osaka. They took over the Kanegafuchi cotton mills. They still operate them and have spread out as the greatest textile producers in Japan. They tapped the China cotton market, buying cotton there and sending back cloth to compete with the English traders. They acquired the Shibaura Engineering Works from the government. Then they fixed their eyes on the Miike mines.

These mines, the greatest coal deposit in Japan, they got through some clever management in the ministry, for 4,550,000 yen. In the first year of operation they made back the whole purchase price. In half a century they realized a profit of 450 million yen. Thus money, cotton, silk, coal, and, little by little, other products fell into the skillfully exploitive hands of the Mitsui family.

Persons outside Japan, when they hear the term “Mitsui family,” are apt to think of an extraordinary group of able and skillful Mitsuis managing the vast network of enterprises that make up their domain. It is more than doubtful if this extraordinary clan would today bulk so large in Japanese economic life if this were so. Even before the restoration, when Takahisa Mitsui was head of the business, the family had already learned to depend upon the administrative abilities of what the Japanese call bantos, or “head clerks.” And it was one of these—Minomura—who piloted the business through the troubles and shifting movements of the restoration period.

Just when the family began using this method is not clear. But always the family council and the heads of the family branches were free to interfere and even to collaborate actively in management. However, around 1890, this numerous and wealthy family organization had to submit to one of those processes that in our corporate affairs we call “reorganization.” And a wholly new technique of management suited to the new era was adopted. It came about thus:

The Mitsuis collected government taxes. The taxes remained on deposit with them. This was a source of great profit. But Japan was growing up. In 1880 the government decided to collect its own taxes and to establish the Bank of Japan. This was a blow to the house. However, they still continued as local agents to transfer taxes from the provinces to Tokyo. But capitalism in Japan was developing all its familiar phenomena. Debt making had proceeded merrily. The farm debt had risen from an insignificant sum to 233 million yen. There were crop failures, un-favorable trade balances, losses on foreign exchange. There came, in short, a first-class capitalist depression. Then rumor began to whisper about the Mitsuis: their bank was in danger. There was a run on the Kyoto branch. It spread to Tokyo. The powerful Mitsuis, who had so many times found the government on its knees begging for loans, now had to appeal to the government for help.

Inouye, powerful finance minister and Mitsui ally, later to be known as the Mitsui representative among the elder statesmen, agreed to save the house but demanded that it should submit to reorganization at his hands. It was in no position to resist. There upon the imperial finance minister set about studying its affairs, its family code and laws, the constitution of similar European families. He decided that the Mitsui enterprises had to be protected ruthlessly from the Mitsui family.

He therefore drew up a new constitution. It organized the Mitsui business as a modern corporation, dominated, controlled, administered by executive heads wholly separated from the family council. It organized the family as a wholly separate entity. As a result, the business was put in the hands of a giant, over-all holding company—the Mitsui Gomei Kaisha—which holds directly or indirectly through subsidiaries all of the numerous enterprises of the concern. It is managed not by the family, but by directors who may include family members. But at the head of the Mitsui Gomei Kaisha is a managing director—a banto, or head clerk—who functions precisely like the chairman of the board of the United States Steel Corporation, as well as through various series of executives.

The family, on the other hand, is merely the stockholder in this immense holding company. On its side it is organized, too. There is a family council. And when you hear of Baron Takakimi Mitsui as head of the family, it means head of this family council. He is, of course, nominal head of the business, too—the Mitsui Gomei Kaisha. But its actual head and manager is its reigning banto, its prime minister.

The family is a carefully organized tribal unit. It is an economic clan existing as a sort of social bolus within the state and functioning under a written constitution. There are, in fact, eleven Mitsui families—six main families and five branch families, all exactly defined under the constitution. These constituent stems are immutable. This family and its domestic provinces are ruled by a family council organized as a sort of constitutional monarchy of which it is the house of peers. This council consists of the eleven heads of each family plus the retired heads, if any, and such heirs apparent of the existing heads as may have arrived at their majority. But only the eleven heads have a vote. The president of this council, the tribal patriarch, with a veto on its judgments, is the head of the chief family. This council meets in secret once a month. It deals with family affairs—philanthropies, deaths, inheritances, marriages, family debts, troubles, assignments of family members to business enterprises, and plans of all sorts. The council determines how much each of the eleven family households shall be permitted to spend. It may impose punishments and invoke sanctions for its decrees. Within the framework of the civil society this autonomous aristocracy assumes to regulate the conduct of its members. All families do not share equally in the dividends of the Mitsui enterprises. The head branch takes 23 per cent of the yield of profits of the Mitsui Gomei Kaisha. The five other main branches take a total of 57.5 per cent, the five branch families take among them 19.5 per cent.

These bantos have been gentlemen of the most imposing importance in Japan, comparable to the board chairmen of such American institutions as General Motors or United States Steel. They have been, in fact, proportionately more important, because the House of Mitsui spreads over a far larger acreage of the economic life of Japan than any American or British corporation. The first of them, Rizaemon Minomura, piloted the family enterprises through the difficult, reformative days of the restoration and helped to shape the modern form and direction of the business. Unlike the Mitsuis themselves he began life as a candy maker and peddler who entered the service of Oguri, the last finance minister of the old Shogunate, became a banker with Oguri as his patron, and entered the Mitsui service to afford it the powerful friendship of the minister. He it was who saw the opportunities opening before the house in the new capitalist restoration period, saw that its beloved textile store at Suruga-cho was small potatoes in the new Japan, induced them to put it aside and turn to finance and promotion on the new model.

He died in 1877, and there followed a more direct family management that ended in the disaster of 1890 and the reorganization in 1900. By this time the Emperor’s finance minister, Kaoru Inouye, was the imperial patron of the Mitsuis and through his influence Hikojiro Nakamigawa became the banto. He was an intellectual, who began as a teacher at Keio University, wrote articles for magazines, served an apprenticeship in the foreign office, edited brilliantly the newspaper, Jiji Shimpo, became president of a railway, and then, at Inouye’s urging, went into the Mitsui bank, rose to its headship, becoming managing director of the Mitsui Gomei Kaisha. He played an important role in the reorganization of the existing industries and the acquiring of new ones. He drove the old Mitsui organization from the more leisurely ways of the old Japan to the faster tempo of the new. He was a bold, shouldering, self-reliant, and driving executive. He died in 1901 to be succeeded by Takasi Masuda.

Masuda had started life as a houseboy for Townsend Harris, first American minister to Japan. He then formed a connection with the powerful Inouye and became the head of his trading company. When the Mitsuis took it over and formed the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, he became its first president and was largely responsible for the success of that institution which started with a loan of 50,000 yen from the Mitsui bank and in sixty years had an authorized capital of 100 million yen. He set the Mitsui foreign trading upon the course that has made it so powerful. He built up the cotton, silk, steel, and munitions business of the company.

When he died he was succeeded by Takuma Dan, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who became the head of the Miike coal mines before the Mitsuis bought them. He built those into the tremendously profitable industry they became. He directed the affairs of the company during the Great War and developed the vast munitions interests of the Mitsuis. He was assassinated in 1932 to be succeeded by the aristocratic Seihin Ikeda, Harvard ’95, a patrician who got a job with the Mitsuis in 1895 at thirty yen a month, became managing director of the Mitsui bank in 1909 and banto in 1933. He was finance minister in the cabinet of Prince Konoye, was for a while governor of the Bank of Japan, and was known as the Tiger of the Money Market. He retired from the headship of the Mitsui house, for the same reason that he retired from the finance ministry, because he was unpopular with the army.

The business organization is for all the world like one of our great American corporate giants held in the hands of a central master holding company, save that its interests are far more diversified. At the top is the holding company—Mitsui Gomei Kaisha. This in turn owns a controlling interest in nineteen other

corporations, most of them subholding companies. There are two others which handle the Mitsui philanthropies.

Through this corporate pyramid the family carries on adventures in finance, trading (domestic and international), department stores, mining, engineering, cement, textiles, lumber, chemicals, coal, oil, sugar, cereals, fertilizers, and so on. The whole imposing web is too complicated to describe. The Mitsui Gomei Kaisha is capitalized at 300,000,000 yen.

The wealth of the family is indeed great—greater still measured against the standards of Japan. Mr. Oland D. Russell, in The House of Mitsui, says that the present head of the House, Baron Takakimi Mitsui, when he came into the estate of his father, took over a taxable inheritance of 166,400,000 yen, or $55,000,000, but adds that Mr. Shumpei Kanda, writing in Shufunotomo, estimated this private wealth at 450,000,000 yen, or about $130,000,000, and that archivists in the Mitsui library admitted this was “probably pretty accurate.” The heads of the other ten families have fortunes as follows:

Takahisa Mitsui	170,000,000 yen
Geneyemon	200,000,000
Baron Takakiyo	230,000,000
Takanaga	140,000,000
Baron Toshitaro	150,000,000
Takamoto	60,000,000
Morinosuke	80,000,000
Takaakira	60,000,000
Benzo	60,000,000
Takateru	35,000,000
TOTAL including Baron Takakimi (450,000,000)	1,635,000,000 yen

This is the equivalent of $450,000,000.

These great fortunes in large measure were the product, of course, of wise management, shrewd organization, and family policies to protect the growing mountain from erosion. But also they were not made without well-arranged, carefully nurtured, and well-oiled contacts with the proper government authorities. The restoration turned out to be a paradise for the rich merchants and the acquisitive patriots. Such statesmen as Inouye, Ito, Okuma made fortunes out of their ministries. Inouye, once Minister of Public Works, built many miles of railroad track. When he resigned, the cost of construction was cut in half. The great liberal Okuma was closely allied with the Mitsubishi. He was premier during the Satsuma rebellion in 1876 and financed it with paper money. It is said that when it was over he hauled several cartloads of scrip to his home. It was not difficult to do business with politicians like this. Almost every leading statesman was backed by some banker or promoter. The Mitsuis helped finance the Seiyukai or conservative party of Ito and Inouye; the Mitsubishis supported the Minseito or liberal party. Inouye, powerful finance minister, was intimately associated with the Mitsuis as a sort of superconsultant—guide, philosopher, and friend. After his retirement a Japanese yearbook referred to him frankly as the Mitsui representative among the Elder Statesmen.

We need not rest this upon mere surmise. In June, 1910, Japan was about to contract for the building of the battleship Kongo. There was keen rivalry for the contract. The Mitsui Bussan Kaisha was agent for Vickers, the British armament firm. Takoto Sokai was agent for the Armstrongs. Both began to put pressure upon Admiral Matsumoto, Director of the Naval Stores Department. The Mitsui Bussan Kaisha engaged Matsuo Tsurutaro, a retired naval constructor-general, because of his intimacy with Matsumoto. He offered Matsumoto one third of Mitsui’s commission from Vickers for the Admiral’s assistance. Matsuo told one of the Mitsui directors of the arrangement. He consulted with the other directors. The Mitsui Bussan Kaisha advised Vickers and asked that their commission be increased to accommodate Admiral Matsumoto’s demands. Vickers approved the deal and the commission was increased to 1,150,000 yen. Admiral Matsumoto was given 400,000 yen. And Mitsui-Vickers got the contract. The deal leaked out.

Similar corrupt deals between the German Siemens-Schuckert Company and Japanese admirals exposed in the Reichstag by Dr. Karl Liebknecht, the socialist leader, excited the suspicion of Diet members in Japan. They did some probing and exposed the whole ugly Japanese bribery plot. Seven Mitsui directors of Mitsui Bussan Kaisha were indicted, along with their agent Matsuo Tsurutaro and Admiral Matsumoto. All were convicted and given two years in prison, Matsumoto getting three years and a fine of 400,000 yen. A little later the Mitsui family set up a fund of 750,000 yen for the education and care of convicts.

We have no need to pursue the fortunes of this extraordinary dynastic family further. The Great War, of course, added enormously to their wealth. The Mitsuis have placed all their influence and power behind the imperialist adventures of Japan in China. They are up to their necks in that episode—and there are men, sinister men in Japan, radicals who hate Mitsui support of the military, and, strange as it may seem, military men too, for different reasons, who look at them with a threatening glance.

The Mitsui family possesses vast wealth. It controls 78 per cent of the paper industry in Japan, 17 per cent of all mining, 15 per cent of rayon, 17 per cent of cement, 11 per cent of coal and shipping, and an enormous amount of Japan’s foreign trade. Its flag, with the Mitsui crest—the Japanese figure three enclosed in a square—may be seen stenciled upon boxes and bales on the docks of the whole world. It has subsidiaries, affiliates, branches everywhere. It operates in Germany as the Deutsche Bussan Aktiengesellschaft, in France as the Société Anonyme Frangaise Bussan, in South Africa as Mitsui Bussan.

The five great family industries of Japan—Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda, Okura—control, according to Mr. John Gunther, 62 per cent of the wealth of Japan, 70 per cent of its textiles, and 40 per cent of its bank deposits. This is not to say that these five groups stand united against Japan. On the contrary, there is keen and, in spots, bitter rivalry between them. The Mitsuis back the Seiyukai or conservative party while the Mitsubishis support the Minseito or liberal party. They are pre-eminent in different fields—Mitsui in foreign trade, textiles, paper; Mitsubishi in shipping and finance, insurance and trust companies; Sumitomo in engineering and the heavy industries; Yasuda in banking—owning the largest bank in Japan—and Okura, a newcomer, in trade and engineering. However, they are one at least in the support of those fundamental principles upon which their vast interests are based.

But all of them face trouble now. The foreign-newspaper reader sees Japan symbolized by a large-jawed, heavy-necked, cruel-looking little soldier with a bayonet. He is apt to think of all Japanese like that. But behind the Japan of the China adventure is a population of plain people deeply troubled and filled with all sorts of discordant elements. The Mitsuis have had one assassination—Takuma Dan, the great banto—in 1932. Today, strangely enough, the army, which it has so loyally supported, asks what service this immense family of traders is supplying in charging the government, which is the army, heavy prices for all that it supplies. Why could not the government take over these supply functions itself? The spirit of the military Fascist looks with unfriendly eyes upon its backers in Japan, as it has done in Germany. The Mitsuis speak softly in Tokyo. They spend moderately, fear to display their wealth. They have created a fund of 30 million yen for a foundation, not unlike the Rockefeller foundations, to purchase national good will. But the Mitsuis and all of the traders and bankers in Tokyo have been playing with fire. The flames leap about them and no one knows who or what they will consume.

This family is unique in the annals of vast wealth gathering. The conditions of their country have made it possible for their founder to succeed in holding it together for so long a time. Money is the greatest of all money-makers. Old Hachirobei knew that. And he knew that if he could hold the central capital of the family together indefinitely its capacity to re-create and expand itself would grow progressively. He was able to create this commercial family dynasty because he wrought in Japan and because his descendants had the wisdom to submit to the creation of a monarchical structure with a monarch holding power in theory and a prime minister, chosen for his brains, exercising it in fact.

Wide World photos

CECIL RHODES

---

¹Social and Economic History of Japan by Eijoro Honjo, p. 79.