VISCOUNT SHIBUSAWA

Evening Star, Issue 21007, 22 January 1932, Page 12

VISCOUNT SHIBUSAWA

BANKER KING OF JAPAN Viscount Eiichi Shibusawa, who has been described as the “ Grand Old Man ” of business, and the banker king of Japan, died in Tokio recently, at the age of ninety-one. He was the son of a small farmer, and as a boy of thirteen he hard that the American, Commodore Peary, had burst open the door with which Japan had shut herself from the rest of the world and anchored his “ black ships ” in the JBay of Tokio. Four years later Shibusawa had his first sight of a white man, who was being taken through the streets of Tokio under an armed escort, and his feelings of racial difference were such that, as ho said afterwards, he had a sort of dread arid even physical repulsipn. But he soon came to know the white man better, for in 1867 he was appointed to accompany the brother of the Tycoon on his mission to Europe. On his return to Japan he became Assistant Vice-minister of Finance, but speedily abandoned his political position to devote his life to business. He concentrated on hanking, and established the First National Bank (the Daiiche Giuko), the Bank of Japan, the Japanese Industrial Bank, and many similar institutions. Of miscellaneous companies, he started and supported scores for railways, gold-mining, gas-making, shipbuilding, electric lighting. weaving,- spinning, brick-laying, sugar-refining, hat-making, and stud farms. Viscount Shibusawa leaves behind him many monuments to his career as a business man :nd a philanthropist. It was his interest in business training that led ultimately to the foundation of the Tokio University of Commerce, which he helped to inaugurate. His interest in social welfare resulted in his elevation to the peerage. Latterly he took a keen interest in the peace movement, and he was President of the League of Nations Association of Japan up to the time of his death.