Yasuda Zenjirō

Yasuda Zenjirō (1838 to 1921) was a Japanese financier from Toyama in Etchu Province who built the Yasuda zaibatsu, one of the great prewar family-controlled financial combines of Japan. Born the son of a poor samurai, he moved to Edo at seventeen and began work in a money changing house. From 1863 he provided tax-farming services to the Tokugawa Shogunate and then to the new Meiji government, profiting from the delay between collecting taxes and forwarding them, and he enlarged his wealth by buying depreciated Meiji paper money that the government later exchanged for gold. He helped establish the Third National Bank in 1876 and in 1880 set up the Yasuda Bank, later the Fuji Bank and now part of Mizuho Financial Group, together with the Yasuda Mutual Life Insurance Company, which later merged into Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance. In 1893 the group absorbed the Tokyo Fire Insurance Company. Sources describe him as one of the best financiers Japan had, though cautious about expanding beyond finance. He gave the Yasuda Auditorium to the University of Tokyo and the Hibiya Kokaido hall, and he was assassinated in 1921 by a nationalist who resented his refusal of a donation.