Our "Wandering Palaceside" series around Palaceside Building. Last time we wrote of Eiichi Shibusawa and the First Bank; relations with Mitsui were delicate.
Mitsui aimed to establish a bank but was opposed by Finance Ministry bureaucrat Shibusawa; as a precursor to the national bank they first formed Mitsui-Ono Union Bank with the Ono group (later bankrupt), cooperating with national policy.
Mitsui finance chief Rizaemon Minomura = photo top = became superintendent with the 1873 First National Bank but did not abandon his own bank; after Ono collapsed he withdrew from the national bank and opened Japan's first private bank, Mitsui Bank, in July 1876.
Mitsui PR's History of Mitsui (http://www.mitsuipr.com/history/index.html) tells episodes of Shibusawa and Minomura. Shibusawa proposed kin-gyo (gold house); Minomura replied exchange includes silver too — hence gin-gyo (bank). The First Bank building took over the Kaiunbashi Mitsui Exchange House Mitsui had prepared; Minomura sold it for more than double the construction cost (~47,000 ryo) and laughed that the new Surugacho Exchange Bank Mitsui House = back right in photo bottom = was almost free.
Minomura wandered as a child, nearly illiterate, yet had sharp insight and organizational skill. In late Edo, Mitsui suffered famine, disaster, and forced shogunal loans. Head clerk Senzo Saito scouted Minomura, running an exchange shop, to negotiate reducing a 1.5 million ryo levy for the Choshu expedition to 500,000, then 180,000 — hired at 44 and rose to grand steward of Mitsui.
He died at 57 in 1877, seeing the bank open. Shibusawa called him an illiterate great man.
