Company history

Mebuki has no founder and no founding year in the ordinary sense. Its older half, Ashikaga Bank, was established in 1895 and spent the post-war boom as the principal lender of Tochigi Prefecture — the bank local manufacturers, builders and affiliated firms went to first. That position was the whole of its strength and, in the end, the whole of its problem: a bank that is the credit system of one prefecture cannot shrink faster than the prefecture does.

The bubble-era loan book — property, construction, group companies — was worked out too slowly. When the deferred tax assets propping up its capital were finally written off in full, the accounts gave way at once: a consolidated net loss of $4.5B (¥518bn) for the half-year to September 2003, net assets of minus ¥102.3bn, and a capital ratio below zero. In November 2003 the government invoked special crisis management under the Deposit Insurance Act, and the Deposit Insurance Corporation acquired every share. Several regional banks took public capital in those years; outright nationalization with full expropriation of shareholders was rare.

For four years and nine months the bank was run to a state timetable. Under the Deposit Insurance Corporation it curbed new lending, thinned the branch network, cut staff and sold down property and equities, rebuilding the balance sheet with the explicit aim of being sold back to private hands. Deposits were never at risk and the branches opened as usual the next morning; what the framework destroyed was shareholder value and the management that had been unable to stop the expansion.

The buyer, when it came, was unusual. Megabanks, other regional groups and funds all looked, but in March 2008 the Financial Services Agency selected a consortium assembled by Nomura Holdings and Next Capital Partners — not another bank, not a state institution, but a securities group. The FSA's stated test was minimizing the public cost, and the consortium met it with roughly $1.2B (¥120bn) for the shares plus a capital injection large enough to close the deficit and put the bank back on the market within a few years. Ashikaga Holdings was incorporated in April 2008 and took the whole of Ashikaga Bank that July.

In December 2013 the holding company listed directly on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange — a debut skipping the usual lower tiers, on the strength of roughly ¥6tn of bank assets and the stability of the earnings. It emerged as an independent regional group across northern Kanto, earning ordinary profit of ¥28.3bn and net profit of ¥24.3bn in the year to March 2014. It would keep that independence for exactly three years.

Standing alone, Ashikaga Bank could not answer the arithmetic of northern Kanto: a shrinking, ageing population, near-zero rates, and a contracting local economy. In November 2015 it reached a basic agreement with Joyo Bank — founded 1935, listed, and the corresponding lender of Ibaraki Prefecture — and in October 2016 the two combined by share exchange, at 1.17 holding-company shares per Joyo share. Ashikaga Holdings renamed itself Mebuki Financial Group.

The structural choice mattered more than the size. The banks did not merge. Both kept their names, their branches and their customers; only strategy, finance and risk management moved up to the holding company. Tochigi and Ibaraki are adjacent but their networks barely overlapped, and in deposit-taking and lending the signboard is the customer base — so it was left alone. Consolidated assets reached about ¥16tn by March 2017, among the largest of any Japanese regional banking group.

What was consolidated was everything the customer does not see. Leasing and securities went first — Mebuki Lease (formerly Joyo Lease) in April 2017, Mebuki Securities (formerly Joyo Securities) that October — followed by Mebuki Credit Guarantee in 2020 and Mebuki Card, formed by merging Joyo Credit and Ashigin Card, in 2021. Earnings settled quickly once the accounting effects of the deal washed out: after ¥52.3bn of ordinary profit and an inflated ¥158.5bn of net profit in the year to March 2017, ordinary profit ran between ¥53bn and ¥70bn for the rest of the decade. The chairs at the top, meanwhile, went to Joyo men in unbroken succession — Terakado Kazuyoshi, then Sasashima Ritsuo, then Akino Tetsuya.

Mebuki moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market in April 2022 and finished the back-office programme the following year, acquiring Joyo Credit Guarantee in April 2023 and folding it under Mebuki Credit Guarantee by share exchange. Two names at the counter, one name behind it — the design was now complete.

The rate cycle then turned in its favour. Ordinary profit rose from ¥65.0bn in the year to March 2022 to ¥82.8bn in the year to March 2025, with net profit up from ¥43.0bn to ¥58.2bn; consolidated revenue grew 34% over the same span, to ¥360.2bn, and consolidated assets approached ¥20tn. The non-bank subsidiaries — leasing, securities, guarantees, cards — now contribute visibly rather than merely existing.

The structural problem is untouched by any of it. Tochigi, Ibaraki and Gunma are losing people, and their young to the cities; deposits and loans, the actual business, cannot grow much in such a market, which is why the group keeps pushing outward into consulting, regional trading and revitalization funds. Nine years after the merger, executive power still runs through the two banks' own career tracks — three consecutive Joyo presidents alongside an Ashikaga deputy president. The generation that remembers 2016 will hand over to one that does not, and how a 130-year-old bank and a 90-year-old bank are passed on inside a single holding company is the question Mebuki has left to answer.