Company history

MUFG has no single founder; it is the confluence of several lineages that began, separately, in money-changing, shipping and the early national banks. The oldest root is the Konoike house, whose money-changing shop the first Konoike Zenemon opened in Osaka in 1656 — a business older than almost any other in Japanese finance. The Mitsubishi line branched instead from shipping: in 1870 Yataro Iwasaki, a low-ranking samurai from Tosa, started a shipping venture in Osaka, and its finance arm — a bill-and-exchange office set up in 1876 to lend against cargo — separated out in 1880 as the Mitsubishi Exchange Office, grew into the banking department of Mitsubishi, and in 1919 was spun off as Mitsubishi Bank. A third strand, three national banks founded in Osaka in the late 1870s, would later combine into Sanwa.

Mitsubishi Bank built its standing on crisis. When the Great Kanto Earthquake struck in 1923 and most Tokyo banks lost their head offices to fire, Mitsubishi’s newly finished headquarters survived; the bank resumed deposit payments ahead of its rivals and opened its own vault to keep stricken banks running. It repeated the rescue in the financial panic of 1927. Twice it had stood firm while others failed, and each time deposits flowed toward it — a shift, from small banks to large, that reshaped prewar Japanese finance and fixed Mitsubishi as one of the three great zaibatsu banks.

The Sanwa line took shape by merger. In December 1933 the three Osaka banks — Konoike, Yamaguchi and Sanjushi — combined as Sanwa Bank; its very first accounts showed deposits of more than ¥1 billion, the largest of any ordinary bank in the country. Wartime concentration then swept both lines into ever larger units, Mitsubishi absorbing the venerable Dai-Hyaku Bank in 1943. The reckoning came with defeat: under the Occupation’s dissolution of the zaibatsu, Mitsubishi was forbidden its own name and traded as Chiyoda Bank from 1948, not recovering the Mitsubishi name until 1953, while Sanwa was written down and re-founded under the reconstruction law. Both lines were broken back to a starting point and set off again.

Both lines re-listed in 1949 and set about very different postwar strategies. Mitsubishi Bank reopened its New York branch in 1952 and London in 1956, working outward from its zaibatsu-era corporate base. Sanwa, from its Osaka ground, made itself the “People’s Bank,” pushing into retail and launching the Dream Loan consumer-finance product in 1960; it too built a foreign network — San Francisco in 1953, London, New York in 1963, Hong Kong in 1964. The cultural gap between them was real: Wataru Tajitsu, who became Mitsubishi’s president in 1972, bluntly conceded how hard it was for a blue-blooded zaibatsu bank to go mass-market.

Mitsubishi led on technology. In 1971 it installed the industry’s first online cash dispenser, and it followed with the integrated deposit account, running at the front of retail banking systems while it expanded abroad — the California-based Kashu Mitsubishi Bank in 1972, membership of the international Orion group, and in 1984 the purchase of the Bank of California, a rare full acquisition of an American bank by a Japanese one.

The bubble years turned into a race for “universal banking.” At Sanwa, the internationally minded Kenji Kawakatsu redirected the bank toward securities and cross-border business, layering an “investment bank” onto the People’s Bank to aim at a full universal model; by 1992 Sanwa held the triple crown in operating, ordinary and net profit, and by 1993 its network topped 1,000 domestic branches, the largest of any Japanese bank. Mitsubishi moved more steadily but along the same road, taking control of Nippon Trust Bank and setting up Diamond Securities in 1994 to add trust and securities arms. Sanwa’s fast, ambitious universalization and Mitsubishi’s steady line ran side by side to the top of the city-bank league — until the next move redrew the whole map.

The pivot came from an old wound. In 1969 Mitsubishi Bank had opened merger talks with Dai-Ichi Bank, only for Dai-Ichi’s chairman, Kaoru Inoue, to reject them as an effective takeover of the smaller partner; the talks broke within the month. Twenty-seven years later, in April 1996, Mitsubishi merged with the Bank of Tokyo — the specialist foreign-exchange bank — to form the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, briefly the largest bank in the world by funds. That merger of two different lineages, a city bank and a foreign-exchange bank, fired the starting gun on the Heisei reorganization that would consolidate Japanese banking into four megabanks.

Then came the holding companies. In 2001 Sanwa, Tokai and Toyo Trust combined into UFJ Bank; in 2002 the Mitsubishi camp formed Mitsubishi Tokyo Financial Group, putting bank, trust and securities under one roof. When UFJ fell into distress, Mitsubishi Tokyo rescued and absorbed it: in October 2005 the two merged into Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, at a stroke Japan’s largest financial group, with about ¥190 trillion in assets and the top place among the four megabanks. A great many institutions born between the early Edo period and the Showa era — Konoike, Iwasaki’s shipping line, Dai-Hyaku, Yamaguchi, Sanjushi, Nippon Trust, the Bank of Tokyo, Tokai — now sat under a single holding company.

MUFG then made two bets at the worst possible moment. In March 2008, just before Lehman Brothers failed, it put about $9 billion into Morgan Stanley — an all-but-unprecedented cross-border rescue-investment, struck on hard terms of preferred stock and a 10% dividend. That August it took full control of Union Bank, a leading West-Coast commercial bank. In the near term the bets hurt: for the fiscal year ended March 2009 MUFG posted a net loss of $2.7B (¥257bn), its first since formation. Over the long run, though, the same two investments lifted MUFG’s overseas earnings to a share unmatched among Japanese banks.

The crisis stake became a franchise. Morgan Stanley returned to the front rank of the capital markets, became an equity-method affiliate in 2011, and its profits grew into a pillar of MUFG’s overseas earnings; in 2010 the two had already turned the relationship into an operating business, founding Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities despite a rocky first year. By the mid-2020s roughly half of MUFG’s profit came from abroad — a structure impossible without the crisis-era bets.

The other overseas engine was Asia. MUFG bought whole local banks to build a partner-bank network across ASEAN: Bank of Ayudhya (Krungsri) in Thailand in 2013, taken by tender offer — with MUFG even handing over its own large Bangkok branch to fold everything into one bank — and Bank Danamon in Indonesia, brought to about 94% by 2019. Cumulative investment in Asia and fintech reached the order of $4.0B (¥600bn), aimed squarely at offsetting the thinning lending margins of a low-rate home market. Then the direction turned: in December 2022 MUFG sold Union Bank’s retail business to U.S. Bancorp for about $8 billion — bought, grown and let go — keeping only a minority stake, a shift from expansion to select-and-concentrate carried out under the digital-minded Hironori Kamezawa, president from 2020.

Capital discipline defined the newest chapter. Under Kamezawa, MUFG doubled its target for selling down cross-shareholdings from $2.3B (¥350bn) to $4.6B (¥700bn), launched a buyback of up to $1.7B (¥250bn), and held to a progressive dividend, lifting its price-to-book ratio briefly above one in 2024. The bank that had swollen its capital through decades of merger was now returning it to shareholders and moving off the policy-stock gains that were bound to shrink. In the year ended March 2025 it posted record profit, set a new medium-term target of a return on equity around 12%, and handed the presidency to Junichi Hanzawa.