渋沢 栄
Eiichi Shibusawa was born on 16 March 1840 in the district of Osato in present-day Saitama Prefecture. His family were wealthy farmers who also raised silkworms and indigo for dye. He at first went by the name Eijiro, which he later changed to Tokudayu.
As a boy he studied Confucianism and swordsmanship. By the age of thirteen he was already taking part in the management of the family business and was said to have displayed a skill at it superior to that of an adult. When he was sixteen, his family was pressed for funds and subjected to insult by the lord of the domain, an experience that aroused in him a lasting resentment and feeling of distaste toward the feudal system.
While Shibusawa was living the life of a vagrant in Kyoto, he was recommended by a retainer of the family of Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu, a relative of the shogun, and entered the service of the powerful Hitotsubashi family. He proved himself highly adept at organizing agrarian troops and handling the family’s financial matters. In 1866, Hitotsubashi Yoshinobu was chosen to be the fifteenth shogun, and Shibusawa became an official of the shogunate.
In 1867, when Yoshinobu’s younger brother Tokugawa Akitake went to Europe to study and to be Japan's official representative to the Paris Exhibition, Shibusaw'a w'ent along as a member of the group. The trip afforded him an opportunity to observe the modern production facilities and economic systems of a number of Western countries and gave him a knowledge of industrial, commercial, and financial matters that helped him greatly in his activities in later years. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, he returned to Japan and took up residence in the domain assigned to the Tokugawa family in Shizuoka. There, with a currency loan of 500,000 ryo from the new Meiji government as a basis, he set up the first stock company in Japan.
In 1869 he became an official in the Ministry of Finance, devoting himself to problems associated with the abolition of the feudal domains and the establishment of prefectures, as well as with the regulation of the currencies issued by the various domains. In 1872 he became chief assistant to the finance minister, who at this time was Inoue Kaoru, but in 1873 both he and Inoue resigned because of differences of opinion between them and the other leaders of the government. Thereafter he devoted himself to business activities in the private sphere.
His activities were characterized by an understanding and appreciation of the capitalist spirit, which he had acquired in Europe earlier, and by the conviction that business and morality must go hand in hand, ideals that played a major role in Japanese economic affairs. In order to provide a fiscal organ to assist the establishment of stock companies, he in 1873 headed the group that founded the First National Bank, a private organization and the first bank to be set up in Japan. In addition, he founded over five hundred companies and enterprises, including Oji Paper, Osaka Spinning, Tokyo Artificial Fertilizer, and Tokyo Gas, as well as finance, insurance, transportation, production, chemical, and electrical corporations or industries. He was likewise determined to combat the popular attitude of reverence for officialdom and contempt for persons in private life through a program of education, working to set up a system of chambers of commerce and himself serving for a period of thirty-eight years as head of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Bankers’ Club.
Feudal ways of thought remained powerful in his time, commerce was looked upon as a discreditable occupation, and the merchants themselves in most cases were content to resign themselves to this state of affairs. These attitudes Shibusawa worked to overthrow, at the same time attempting to curb the excessive pursuit of profit. He insisted that business enterprises should be conducted in accordance with strict ethical principles, seeking for moral guidance in the teachings of the Confucian Analects and rejecting commercial methods that diverted from such principles. He looked upon trust as the only true foundation for commercial enterprises, and himself became the leading figure in the world of such enterprises. After his retirement from active business life in 1916, he devoted himself to various activities designed to promote the public welfare, among them the founding of homes for tire aged.
At the same time, in order to train business leaders for the future, he supported Tokyo Commercial College and other schools designed to give such training. In all, he was said to have been affiliated in one way or another with over six hundred organizations and business enterprises.
In the later years of the Edo period, when the movement to overthrow the shogunate and restore power to the emperor was gathering momentum, he responded with enthusiasm and became friendly with the groups of samurai advocating the restoration of imperial power and the expulsion of the foreigners. He joined in a plan to attack and set fire to the settlement of foreign traders in Yokohama, but the plan was thwarted before it could be put into execution and the group disbanded.
