Founding Idemitsu Shokai in Moji: from peddling machine oil to the sea and the continent (1911)

The terms attached to someone else’s money

What marks this founding is less where the money came from than how few conditions came with it. The ¥8,000 Hida Shigetaro gave Idemitsu Sazo required no repayment, no interest and no business reports; the only wishes attached were that he stay independent and that he and his brothers get along. A loan would have let the repayment schedule set the pace of trade; an investment would have brought dividends and interference. Starting with money that was neither, Sazo was not chased by monthly profitability, and could try from the very first day the unorthodox things — selling the oil his seniors thought was in decline, skipping the wholesalers to deliver straight to the consumer. His choice of an apprentice’s apron over a large merchant house, despite a Kobe commercial college degree, was continuous with the character of that money: both put independence itself at the centre.

At the same time, that lightness at the start was the very thing that bound Idemitsu for a long time afterwards. A business with no shareholders takes orders from no one, but it also has no capital to fall back on when times are hard. The man who carried oil alone in 1911 endured the isolation of 1953 — described as twelve companies against one — over the Iranian crude imports, and after the defeat chose to dismiss none of some 2,000 employees. Whether the experience of being granted independence by money he never had to return is what resonates in the later refusal to cut people cannot be settled from his own words. But the way a business begun in gratitude came to redirect that debt away from its financier and toward its staff and its customers still leaves the outline of the later Idemitsu worth re-reading.