Founding Mitsui Bussan — a trading house started with no capital (1876)

What it means that a company founded without capital was born twice

What this founding demonstrates is the meaning of putting people, rather than capital, at the organizing principle of a company. Because the Mitsui family needed the losses of trade held in a separate legal body, no formal capital was recorded, and Masuda Takashi — working from the conviction that “the way of commerce lies in men” — sent young staff overseas. A structure in which the business is run by the people posted abroad rather than by the money on hand looks like organization-building that turned the constraint of having no capital inside out. The early progress from consignment sales of coal to trade across every category appears to have prepared the mould of the general trading house that followed.

The other thing that comes into view is a course in which the same name disappeared once and was raised again. The Mitsui Bussan that had grown to global scale before the war was scattered into more than 200 companies by the 1947 break-up, and as an organization was lost. Even so, the human network of the old Mitsui Bussan remained inside the fragments, and with the Great Merger of 1959 the name was revived around Daiichi Bussan. Experiencing both the dissolution of a prewar trading house and the birth of a postwar one under the same signboard is particular to Mitsui & Co.; one could say that a movement of postwar history — the dismantling of the zaibatsu — and the revival of a single company overlapped beneath one name.