Meeting Minomura Rizaemon

Minomura Rizaemon, who stood in the business world of the Meiji era as the chief manager of Mitsui, began as one servant living in at the Oguri residence at Kanda Surugadai. He was a big man with no letters, several records agree. Where Oguri found him, and what he saw in him — here we keep to the meeting itself.

Sakamoto Fujiyoshi sets down the first half of Minomura's life as follows. His father was a masterless samurai of Dewa province named Kimura, who later came to Edo. Minomura himself was born in Edo in the eleventh month of 1821, six years older than Oguri. In deep poverty he moved about between Osaka and Kyushu, was orphaned in 1834 and wandered, and came back to Edo in 1839.

In Edo he went into service with Maruya, a dried-sardine wholesaler in Fukagawa, and through the good word of Gotō of the gold mint, a connection of his master's, entered the Oguri residence at Kanda Surugadai as a live-in hand. Tradesmen, pedlars, craftsmen and casual hands from the lower town came and went about the residence every day, and he was one of them.

Taken notice of by Oguri at the residence, he was placed through Oguri's good offices as adopted son-in-law of Kinokuniya, an oil and sugar merchant of Mikawachō, and took the name Minogawa Rihachi. While hawking sugar confectionery he saw, with his instinct for money, that the small-change business would pay, and he bought the stock of Iseya in front of Denzūin at Koishikawa and set up. This was in 1852, or by another account in 1855. From about then he began to come and go at the Mitsui house in Suruga-chō, Nihonbashi, and was known as “Kinori”.

The most direct account of what Oguri saw in him is Ninagawa Arata's. A passage of Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke (the political struggle around the Restoration and Oguri Kōzukenosuke) is quoted in Abe Dōzan's book.

“There was a man called Minomura Rizaemon. He had nerve and ability beyond other men, but he was unlucky and could not make his way, and lived poorly by retailing oil. While he was coming and going at the Oguri house the man caught Oguri's eye, and Kōzukenosuke made him a steward of the Oguri house.”

On the scene of the meeting, one tradition has them coming to know each other on his oil round, another has it begin from his being a live-in hand at the residence; the details do not agree. What they share is that it was neither rank nor learning but nerve and a head for figures that were seen in him. Abe Dōzan writes that the foundation of Minomura's finance was “learned in that short period as a steward of the Oguri house”.

When he was taken into Mitsui later, he put his own surname together. The “mi” of Mitsui, the “no” of Minogawa, his adoptive father's name, and the “mura” of Kimura, his true father's name — these joined made “Minomura”. For a given name he took “Rizaemon”, as suited a Mitsui manager. The name itself is a record of a career made by being picked up out of nowhere.

Oguri Nikki survives for the period from the first month of 1867 to the end. Minomura first appears there on the sixteenth day of the second month of 1867. The entry for that day runs to only three lines in all, and one of them reads as follows.

“Item. Minomura Rizaemon came; I saw him.”

For about half a year after that Minomura's name does not appear. From the eighth month on, though, it appears again and again. That is exactly when the issue of the Edo–Yokohama note by Mitsui's office of shogunal business and the founding of the Hyōgo Shōsha began to move. A man who had been a servant coming and going about the residence had become one of the commissioner of finance's daily callers.

What shows the shape of the relation best is a scene in the first month of 1868. Learning that Oguri had decided to give up the residence at Surugadai and withdraw to Gonda in Jōshū, his old fief, Minomura hurried to the Surugadai house and offered a thousand ryō in gold. Now was not the time; he should take this and cross to America for a while; the time to welcome him back would surely come — so he is said to have urged. Oguri firmly refused the kindness. Soon afterwards the two parted, one going west and the other east.

Minomura is said to have told people, in later years, the following.

“Had my former master Oguri been alive today and set in a high place in finance, what he would have done for the finances of the state is beyond measuring. What I do, seen from my former master, is no more than a child's play.”

Having founded the Mitsui Bank and become one of the representative financiers of Meiji Japan, he still called his own work “a child's play”. And Masuda Takashi, the first president of Mitsui Bussan, which Minomura founded, headed the first of the trading companies that learned from the Hyōgo Shōsha, the first joint-stock company in Japan, founded by Oguri — and, as a young man, learned English from “Tommy”, Tateishi Onojirō of the embassy to the United States.

What this meeting brought to Mitsui is treated in another article. → The man who saved Mitsui, and how far he rose　→ The first convertible paper money in Japan, the Edo–Yokohama note

Sources: Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987; Abe Dōzan, Kaigun no Senkusha Oguri Kōzukenosuke Seiden (a true life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke, pioneer of the navy), Kaigun Yūshūkai, 1941 (including a quotation from Ninagawa Arata's Ishin Zengo no Seisō to Oguri Kōzukenosuke); Oguri Nikki (the Oguri diaries), Gunma Prefecture Historical Materials vol. 7