MERCHANT PRINCES

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1042, 5 August 1930, Page 9

MERCHANT PRINCES

A JAPANESE DYNASTY Senior Baron Hachiroyemon, fourteenth Baron Mitsui, is planting a million saplings in'Korea in readiness for the second millennium of the romantic “Merchant Empire” of the House of Mitsui. By that time the saplings will constitute a legacy of valuable old trees. , For 1,300 years the Mitsui "dynasty” of Japanese merchant princes has flourished in increasing prosperity and national power. A hundred years before Mayer Anselm Bauer founded the famous House of Roths child, the rich and powerful Mitsui family were centuries ahead of their time in financial enterprise and commercial organisation. Takatoshi Mitsui, “Takatoshi the Great,” who died in 1694, opened what is claimed to be the first “fixed price, cash, no credit” department store in the world. He ran it on twentieth century lines of “service” and “publicity.” Departing from all tradition, this bygone Mitsui catered for the individual customer, even to loaning oil-paper umbrellas to his clients leaving the store in an unexpected shower of rain. The umbrellas bore his name and trade-mark Takatoshi adopted extraordinarily modern methods of publicity, using publications and the theatre as chan nels of advertising. The Mitsui family constitution dates from the seventeenth century. High standards of business honesty and morality, conduct of private life, family co-operation, ideals of achievement, are included in its precepts. Upon coming of age, every Mitsui son swears the family oath at the family shrine, undertaking among other things to “strengthen the everlasting ancestral foundation of the families of our house, and to expand the enterprises bequeathed to us by our forefathers.”-