MERCHANT PRINCES

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 23, 26 July 1930, Page 29

MERCHANT PRINCES

Senior Baron Hachiroyenum, fourteenth Baron Mitsui, is planting a mil- : lion saplings in Korea in readiness for < the second millennium of the romantic < "Merchant Empire" of the House of : Mitsui. -By that time the saplings will : constitute a legacy of, valuable old i trees. < For thirteen hundred years the Mitsui j "Dynasty" of Japanese merchant ' princes has flourished in increasing prosperity and national power. A hundred years before Mayer Anselm Bauer founded the famous House of Rothschild, the rich and powerful Mitsui family were centuries ahead of their time in financial enterprise and commercial organisation. Takatoshi Mitsui, "Takatoshi tho-Great," who died in 1694, opened what is claimed to be the first "fixed price, cash, no credit" department store in the world. He ran it on twentieth century lines of "service" and "publicity." Departing from all tradition, this bygone Mitsui catered for the individual customer, even to loaning oil paper umbrellas to his elionts leaving the store in an unexpected shower of rain. The umbrellas bore his name and trade mark. Takatoshi adopted extraordinarily modern methods of publicity, using publications and the theatre as channels of advertising.

A JAPANESE OYINASTY

The Mitsui family constitution dates from the 17th century. High standards of business honesty and morality, conduct of private life, family co-operation, ideals of achievement, are included in its precepts. Upon coming of age, every Mitsui son swears the family oath at the family shrine, undertaking amongst other things, to "strengthen the everlasting ancestral foundation of the families of our house, and to expand the enterprises bequeathed'to us by our forefathers. . . ." '

Seventy-three-year-old Baron Hachiroyemon, according to a recent report of Mitsui activities by Miss N. A. Osborne, rules over a. business whose f '' agencies ■ abroad outnumber the Embassies and Consulates of the Empire.'' Deposits witli the Mitsui Bank exceed the revenue from all the cities of Japan for 1929. In the constant safe-keeping of the Mitsui lie one-fifth of all goods "warehoused in the Empire. A quarter' of Japan's"commerce, both import and export, is handled by the Mitsui Trading Company, and, 40 per cent, of her coal. Under the firm's flag or charter, are three and a quarter million tons of shipping—as large a tonnage as the whole mercantile marine of Prance.

Estimates of tho Mitsui wealth vary from £50,000,000 to £200,000,000. ■•