Baron Baron is a rank of nobility or title of honour, often Hereditary title, hereditary, in various European countries, either current or historical. The female equivalent is baroness. Typically, the title denotes an aristocrat who ranks higher than ...

Koyata Iwasaki was a Japanese industrialist who served as the fourth and last president of the unified

Mitsubishi The is a group of autonomous Japanese multinational companies in a variety of industries. Founded by Yatarō Iwasaki in 1870, the Mitsubishi Group traces its origins to the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, a unified company that existed from 1870 to 194 ...

. He was the last person to hold the office before the Allied Occupation Forces ordered the dissolusion of all major ''

zaibatsu is a Japanese language, Japanese term referring to industrial and financial vertical integration, vertically integrated business conglomerate (company), conglomerates in the Empire of Japan, whose influence and size allowed control over signifi ...

''.

Early life and education

Koyata was born in 1879 in Tokyo as the eldest son of Yanosuke Iwasaki, the second president of Mitsubishi, and Sanae Iwasaki, the daughter of Shojiro Goto. He attended the First Higher School, then matriculated at Tokyo Imperial University. He later matriculated at

Pembroke College, Cambridge Pembroke College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college is the third-oldest college of the university and has over 700 students and fellows. It is one of the university's larger colleges, with buildings from ...

, where he read history, geography, and sociology. He started working for Mitsubishi in 1906. In 1906, he married Takako ( 岩崎孝子), the daughter of Baron Uzuhiko Shimazu. Upon his father's death in 1908, he inherited the barony.

As President of Mitsubishi

He succeeded his cousin Kyuya as the President of Mitsubishi in 1916, during the First World War. He held the office for 29 years, a period during which he significantly expanded the group. He spun off each department into a subsidiary, covering sectors such as mining, shipbuilding, banking, trading, and real estate. Under his leadership, Mitsubishi enjoyed de facto monopolies or oligopolies in many of these sectors. To further expand the group, he sold nearly half of the shares of these subsidiaries to the public, while Mitsubishi headquarters, led by him, owned the rest. In 1917, he also privately funded the establishment of an optics company and became the majority shareholder, which later became

Nikon (, ; ) is a Japanese optics and photographic equipment manufacturer. Nikon's products include cameras, camera lenses, binoculars, microscopes, ophthalmic lenses, measurement instruments, rifle scopes, spotting scopes, and equipment related to S ...

. After the loss of the Second World War in 1945, the Allied Occupation Forces ordered all major ''

'' to be split into smaller companies, and all members of the founding families were forced to sell all the shares they held. Koyata was strongly opposed to this order but died in December of the same year. The site of his house in

Roppongi Roppongi (, , 'six trees') is a district of Minato, Tokyo, Minato, Tokyo, Japan, famous for the affluent Roppongi Hills development area and popular night club scene. A few foreign embassies are located near Roppongi, and the night life is popu ...

is now occupied by the International House of Japan. Although the building was rebuilt in 1955, the garden remains largely as it was when Koyata commissioned it in 1930.

Atami Yowado

Atami Yowado (熱海陽和洞) was a holiday villa of Koyata Iwasaki located in Atami,

Shizuoka Prefecture is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Chūbu region of Honshu. Shizuoka Prefecture has a population of 3,555,818 and has a geographic area of . Shizuoka Prefecture borders Kanagawa Prefecture to the east, Yamanashi Pref ...

. Iwasaki commissioned Ogawa Jihei VII, a renowned garden architect from Kyoto, to build the garden in a grand style. In April 1978, member companies of the Mitsubishi Kinyokai, core 29 companies of Mitsubishi Group, inaugurated "Management committee of Atami Yowado" (熱海陽和洞管理委員会). Today, the villa is used as a club for Mitsubishi executives.Koyata Iwasaki's holiday house
Retrieved 2024-07-04.

References

External links

Architectural Legacy of the old Mitsubishi organizationManagement committee of Atami Yowado
(in Japanese) {{DEFAULTSORT:Iwasaki, Koyata 20th-century Japanese businesspeople Alumni of Pembroke College, Cambridge University of Tokyo alumni 1879 births 1945 deaths