Masuda Takashi

Baron Masuda Takashi (1848 to 1938) was a Japanese industrialist, investor and art collector, and one of the prominent entrepreneurs of Japan in the Meiji, Taisho and early Showa periods. Born on Sado Island in what is now Niigata Prefecture, the son of a Tokugawa shogunate official, he worked as an interpreter for the American consul general Townsend Harris at the age of fourteen and travelled with the 1863 Japanese embassy to Europe. After a post at the Ministry of Finance and a short time as Master of the Mint, he set up the Senshu Kaisha trading company in 1874 and in 1876 became president of the Mitsui Trading Company, Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. The source credits him with turning Mitsui into a zaibatsu through the creation of the general trading company Mitsui & Co. Under his leadership Mitsui acquired the Miike coal mines, which became Mitsui Mining, and by the 1910s it was Japan's largest general trading company, handling nearly a fifth of the country's trade. He also established a newspaper that was later renamed the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He retired in 1913, devoted himself to the tea ceremony and was raised to the rank of baron in 1918.