Origins
Yasuda ZenjirÅ moved to Edo at the age of 17 and began working in a money changing house. In 1863, he started providing tax-farming services, and greatly magnified his wealth by buying up depreciated Meiji paper money that the government subsequently exchanged for gold. He quickly began to amass newly available capital, establishing the Third National Bank in 1876 and forming the Yasuda Bank (later known as the Fuji Bank) in 1880, the center of the Yasuda zaibatsu.
Yasuda consolidated his empire in banking and finance, specializing in backing small and medium-sized traders and industrialists. In 1880, Yasuda founded the Yasuda Mutual Life Insurance Company (now Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance). In 1893, the Yasuda zaibatsu absorbed the Tokyo Fire Insurance Company, later renamed the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company.
Read more about this topic: Yasuda Zaibatsu
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)