Mitsui Takahira

Mitsui Takahira was born in 1653 in Matsusaka in a family of Mitsui Takatoshi who ran a sake brewery and a moneylending business. At age of seven he was sent to private school in order to learn arithmetic, reading, writing, morals, and manners. After he completed education, his father recognized his talent for business and decided to include him in the family business. Only six sons out of eleven passed the father’s test of competency.

At age of 16 he was sent to apprenticeship to a drapery store of his uncle in the new capital Edo, present day Tokyo. He mastered the family business which based on buying of valuable cloth in Kyoto for resale in Edo. After the death of his uncle, his father moved with his brothers in Edo, while Takahira, at the time 20 years old, became in charge for his father’s shop in Kyoto. Takahira eventually gained the honorific nickname of Hachiroemon, or helper of his father Takatoshi Hachirobei.

Takahira and his father revolutionized and improved the business family strategy. They were buying cloth fabric in Kyoto when the prices were lowest, and they sold it in Edo only for cash and in any size the customer wanted.

In 1683 his father expended the family business to banking by opening a bank in Edo, called Mitsui Ryogayedana or Mitsui exchange house, and soon afterwards the bank branches in Kyoto and Osaka. The family which was from 1687 the shogun’s supplier for cloth was appointed in 1691 as one among the twelve fiscal agents, or goyo shonin, responsible for collecting the taxes in Osaka. In becoming a fiscal agent of the shogun, Takahira reached the highest social position available to a merchant. With his two brothers he formed an association that became the Mitsui-gumi, or Mitsui union.

When his father died in 1694, Takahira became head of the Mitsui family at age forty-one. The cash part of his inheritance alone was 81,000 ryo gold coins or about $43 million in 2010 dollars. His father bequeathed that fortune to Takahira and to families of the five others sons engaged in business and three associate families. They would become known as a confederated family empire of nine “houses”. In 1710, Takahira established the Omotokata system of an overall corporate headquarters for the separate family businesses of trading and banking. He also continued his father’s system of division of labor and bonus payments for top employees.

He died in 1737 at age of 84. In his famous will, Sochiku Isho, he spelled out the rules for the members of the houses of Mitsui, seeking to instill family harmony and building a co-fraternal partnership among all family branches, and gave sound business advices.

Takahira’s organization of the family business contributed to the unbroken success of the Mitsui family enterprise until Japan’s defeat in World War II in 1945.