The man who saved Mitsui, and how far he rose

Minomura Rizaemon, put in charge of Mitsui's office of shogunal business, made a move in the tenth month of 1866 that saved Mitsui from a crisis of survival. Behind it, the story goes, stood the backing of Oguri, then commissioner of finance.

The relation between the two men, though, was a good deal unlike what the pairing of a high official of the shogunate and the manager of a great merchant house suggests. When they met, Rizaemon was hawking oil.

Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke gives the first half of Rizaemon's life as follows. Beyond his having been born in Shinshū, neither his birthplace nor his earlier name is known. Past twenty he left home and was hired by a sake brewer at Itami as a rice pounder. Four meals a day meant rice heaped in a one-tō measure with pickled plums buried at its four corners, shared out among his fellows. Such was the life.

Judging that he could make nothing of himself there, he went to Edo, settled at a labourers' lodging house in Mikawachō, worked for a time as a labourer, and then took regular employment with Kinokuniya, an oil merchant in the same quarter. The work was hawking oil, and his round took him about Ogawachō and Surugadai. It was on that round that he came to know Oguri.

A hatamoto of 2,500 koku and an oil shop's hired man. By the common sense of the day they were not people who exchanged words. Yet Oguri, the joint work says, was not a man to make a show of rank. Big, strong and never sparing of himself: he saw Rizaemon as that kind of man, and in time noticed his talent for money. Such is the meeting as this book draws it.

When the head of Kinokuniya died of illness and Rizaemon's name came up as successor, he went to Surugadai to ask advice. Rizaemon declined firmly, saying he was a countryman who hardly knew his letters; Oguri urged him to take it. The joint work draws the scene as a conversation cast in terms of sumo rankings. He had only just reached the jūryō division, but he was not a wrestler who would end at jūryō. Taking over Kinokuniya was like rising to the maegashira, and no wrestler goes from jūryō to ōzeki at a single bound.

The conversation itself is the author's reconstruction and cannot be read as a record as it stands. But the shape of the relation — that Rizaemon went to Surugadai on every occasion to ask Oguri's judgement — is common to several accounts.

Oguri set his seal on him once more. He recommended Rizaemon, of his own accord, to the house of Mitsui, one of the richest in Edo. The occasion was an exchange when, as commissioner of finance, he had required a levy of Mitsui. Finding that the head of the house, Hachirōemon, could not meet so large a sum, Oguri did not press but broke off the demand, and in the talk that followed heard that Echigoya was still being run on the old single-entry ledgers.

The method of accounts should be changed — what was later called double-entry bookkeeping — and had they a mind to try one man at it? Oguri put a man forward, and that man was Rizaemon. Taken up by Minomura, a manager of the house of Mitsui, he became his successor, and Kinokuniya Rizaemon became Minomura Rizaemon.

Mitsui was carrying large bad debts from its lending to the daimyo and was hard pressed to raise the shogunal levy as well. To hold loans with little prospect of recovery indefinitely might bring Mitsui itself down.

What Minomura then led was a device for recovering the daimyo loans called the “loan against goods in the city of Edo”. The sources differ in how they describe its name and its workings in detail, but in substance it used the authority and credit of the shogunate as backing to open a way for settling and recovering the loans that had gone bad. By this, it is held, Mitsui rode out the crisis over the levy.

It is handed down that this device could be carried out because Oguri, at the heart of the shogunate's finances as commissioner of finance, was backing Minomura. That a mere money changer risen from the casual hands could set so large a financial operation moving is hard to imagine without a connection to the centre of the shogunate. For Oguri too, securing a house as rich as Mitsui as a partner in matters of finance must have meant a great deal.

With this affair Minomura's standing in Mitsui became unshakeable, and he rose to be chief manager and in practice to direct the management of the house. The connection with the old shogunate became, ironically, one of the footholds from which Mitsui grew into a financial combine after 1868. The next year held another large piece of work. → The first convertible paper money in Japan, the Edo–Yokohama note

Minomura went on rising after Oguri was beheaded. On 12 September 1872, the day the first railway in Japan opened between Shinbashi and Yokohama, only two guests from outside the government gave addresses. Takashima Kaemon represented Yokohama, and Minomura Rizaemon represented Tokyo.

The joint work tells an anecdote here. The day before, the aide who had copied the address out fair asked whether he should put readings over all the characters to be safe. Rizaemon answered that the first line or two would do and the rest was not needed. On the day, at the ceremony attended by the Meiji emperor, the address as read out could be followed at the start, but after that no one could tell what he was saying. He read it through to the end all the same, and then suddenly threw up both hands and gave three cheers.

A man who had begun as a rice pounder and never grew easy with letters stood for Tokyo at the opening of the railway. What pushed him into that first step was a hatamoto of Surugadai, met on an oil round.

The joint work records one thing more. Kuniko, Tadamasa's child born at Aizu, later settled with the house of Tatebe, her mother's family, but in time was taken in by the Minomura family. Rizaemon's care, it says, was always of the most thorough.

There is another tradition, though, that it was Ōkuma Shigenobu who took Kuniko in, and how the two fit together has not yet been sorted out. Either way, the point that the child left by an executed shogunal official was protected by someone's hand does not change.

Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975; Sakamoto Fujiyoshi, “Hyōgo Shōsha” o Tsukutta Saigo no Bakushin: Oguri Kōzukenosuke no Shōgai (the last shogunal official, the man who created the Hyōgo Shōsha: the life of Oguri Kōzukenosuke), Kōdansha, 1987