Iwasaki Yataro

Iwasaki Yataro was a Japanese businessman who founded the enterprise that grew into the Mitsubishi conglomerate, taking control of a shipping company in 1870 that was renamed Mitsubishi in 1873, during the early decades of Japan's Meiji-era drive toward rapid industrial modernization. Government contracts to transport troops and supplies, including during the 1874 Taiwan expedition and the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, brought the young company ships and official favor that allowed it to grow quickly beyond its shipping origins into mining, shipbuilding, banking and other sectors. He built Mitsubishi using a highly centralized, family-controlled management structure that became a model for the broader zaibatsu system, the large family-run industrial and financial conglomerates that dominated much of Japan's economy through the early twentieth century. His 1884 acquisition of the Nagasaki Shipyard laid the groundwork for what later became Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the company's major successor firms, and although Iwasaki himself died in 1885, the enterprise he built continued to expand under his brother and descendants into one of the largest and most influential business groups in modern Japanese history.