The Shipping War: In 1885, the Overlord Fell in the Midst of Competition

In February 1885 (Meiji 18), in Tokyo. Iwasaki Yatarō, who reigned over the shipping world, lay on his sickbed.

It was stomach cancer. He was fifty. Yatarō, who had raised Mitsubishi into Japan's largest shipping company, spent his last days in the midst of a fierce freight-rate competition with the government-affiliated Kyōdō Un'yu company.

The man who had built Japan's greatest wealth was about to depart the world with his aim unfinished, without seeing the death-struggle with his archrival settled.

What made Yatarō's Mitsubishi leap was the government's military transport. In the Taiwan Expedition of 1874, and the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, Mitsubishi took sole charge of the transport of the government army's troops and supplies.

The transport demand of the Satsuma Rebellion, the largest civil war in the country, was enormous, and Mitsubishi gained vast profit from it.

Under government protection, Mitsubishi climbed to a position that nearly monopolized Japan's shipping.

Yatarō became, in name and in fact, the shipping king.

Against Mitsubishi's monopoly, criticism rose from within and without the government.

It was the denunciation that, as a political merchant, he was devouring privilege.

In time, the Kyōdō Un'yu company, backed by Mitsui and others, was established and challenged Mitsubishi head-on.

The two companies plunged into a war of attrition, lowering freight rates to the limit against each other.

That competition, fighting over a single passenger at an extraordinary fare, sharply drained the strength of both sides.

This death-struggle over the hegemony of the shipping world ate away even at Yatarō's mind and body.

In February 1885, in the midst of the fierce competition, Yatarō departed the world of stomach cancer.

He was fifty. He could not see the settlement with his archrival through. Soon after Yatarō's death, Mitsubishi and Kyōdō Un'yu, worn out by the war of attrition, merged, and Nippon Yūsen was born.

Ironically, Yatarō's death put an end to the two sides' quagmire of competition.

The life of the man who had been born the son of a jige-rōnin and built Japan's greatest wealth in a single generation closed halfway along the road.

But the Mitsubishi that Yatarō built was inherited by his brother and son and developed into a giant zaibatsu bearing the core of the Japanese economy.

The obsession of the man who rose from the lowest stratum kept moving Japan even after his death.