The Founding of Mitsubishi: In 1873, He Turned the Chaos of Abolished Domains into Opportunity

In 1873 (Meiji 6), in Ōsaka. Iwasaki Yatarō raised the banner of the Mitsubishi Shōkai.

Its predecessor was the shipping enterprise the Tosa domain had run. With the abolition of the domains in 1871, the domain vanished, and the domain's ships and enterprises had lost their place.

Yatarō took these on as a personal enterprise and turned to the shipping business.

With the legacy of the old domain as his capital, one man founded a modern company.

The history of Mitsubishi began from this gamble.

After the Restoration, many former domain warriors lost their stipends and were left behind by the change of the age.

But Yatarō was different. He skillfully took over as his own the ships and enterprises of the Tosa domain, left in the air by the abolition.

His skill in settling the old domain's debts and securing the ships as private property was at times called high-handed.

But Yatarō had the wit to turn chaos into opportunity. At a turning point of the age where everyone else was at a loss, he alone had his eye fixed on the next move.

Yatarō narrowed his enterprise down to shipping alone. In early-Meiji Japan, which still had no rail network, shipping that carried great numbers of people and goods was the lifeline of modernization.

Yatarō renamed the company the Mitsubishi Shōkai, increased its ships, and widened its routes.

Yatarō's advanced quality lay in his attempt to build a modern company organization unlike the old merchant houses.

Mitsubishi's three-diamond trademark too was born around this time. Yatarō was steadily beginning to build the foundation of a giant enterprise that would bear Japan's logistics.

What decided Yatarō's leap was his bond with the new government. For the Meiji government, seeking to build a modern state, a reliable shipping capacity was indispensable.

Yatarō grasped that demand precisely and moved his ships at the government's request.

This strategy of building his own enterprise into the state's modernization projects pushed Mitsubishi up at a stroke.

The son of a jige-rōnin who had turned an age of chaos into opportunity was now becoming a presence bearing the logistics of a newborn Japan.

Beyond that, an even greater leap awaited.