Ōkura Kihachirō

Ōkura Kihachirō

Bust in Shibata

Ōkura Kihachirō ( Japanese 大 倉 喜 八郎 ; born October 23, 1837 in Niigata Prefecture ; died April 22, 1928 ) was a Japanese entrepreneur during the Meiji and Taishō periods .

life and work

Ōkura Kihachirō was the son of a smaller trader in Niigata Prefecture. He went to Edo in the 1850s and started an arms trade there. So he supplied the opponents of the shogunate in the civil war in 1868 with weapons, then founded the company "Ōkura-gumi Shōkai" (大 倉 組 商会) in 1873 and began to act in general. Even so, supplying the new government with arms and other military goods remained his main business. He earned very well in the crackdown on the Satsuma Rebellion and later in the Sino -Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War . So he remained a "political trader" (政商, Seishō) all his life.

Ōkura invested his profits in foreign trade and large-scale industrial enterprises, often in areas in which others could not or did not dare to invest their capital. He supported, for example, the "Tōkyō Electric Lighting" (today Tōkyō Electric Power ) and the construction of the new building of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright . He developed a chain of interests that spanned trade, insurance, mining, and construction, including investing in Manchuria and China. In 1911 his conglomerate led by Ōkura-Gumi a. a Ōkura Shōji (today Ōkura Co.), Ōkura Doboku (大 倉 土木: civil engineering, today Taisei Corporation), Ōkura Kōgyō (大 倉 工業). The breadth of his interests made him a kind of zaibatsu , but what was missing was his own bank.

Ōkura was one of the first to take care of the training of young people in the economic sector by founding the "Ōkura Commercial School", today's Tokyo University of Economics and Business (東京 経 済 大学, Tōkyō keizai daigaku). His extensive collection of Chinese and Japanese art is kept and shown in its own museum, the Ōkura Shūkokan . The museum is right in front of the Ōkura Hotel, which is one of the best in Japan.

Remarks

1. ↑ The museum's holdings were expanded to include modern Japanese painting by Ōkura's son Kishichirō (1882–1963).

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Ōkura Kihachirō . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X
• Hunter, Janet: Ōkura Kihachirō . In: Concise Dictionary of Modern Japanese History. Kodansha International, 1984. ISBN 4-7700-1193-8 .

Web links

Commons : Ōkura Kihachirō  - collection of images

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Ōkura is the family name, Kihachirō the first name.