Company history

A trust only works if the person handing over the property can believe in the person managing it. That is why the first one in Japan had to come from a house that already had the credit. After the Trust Business Act was promulgated in April 1922, Yoneyama Umekichi — a managing director of Mitsui Bank who had studied trust practice in the United States — drew up plans for a trust company built on solid foundations, with the backing of Dan Takuma of Mitsui Gomei. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 nearly killed the scheme; Yoneyama pushed it through, and Mitsui Trust was incorporated on 25 March 1924, the first trust company in the country.

Credit did the rest. By the end of November 1928 Mitsui Trust held about 30% of all the assets entrusted to Japan’s 37 trust companies — 80% of its own book in money trusts, 19% in securities trusts — and lent them out to electric power and private railways, sharing with the Industrial Bank of Japan the work of supplying long-term capital that ordinary banks would not. Sumitomo Trust followed in July 1925, capitalized by Sumitomo Kichizaemon and the Sumitomo interests, lending long-term plant money and buying corporate bonds, and joining the government-bond underwriting syndicate in 1932. Mitsui in Kanto and Sumitomo in Kansai became the two poles of the pre-war industry.

The wars and the defeat reshaped the form but not the position. The 1927 panic passed the trust companies by — money trusts ran for a minimum of two years, so there was nothing to run on — but wartime inflation hollowed them out, and the 1943 concurrent-business law let parent banks absorb most of the regional trusts. The big zaibatsu trusts kept their independence, and seven survived the war to become the frame of the post-war industry. With the wealthy individuals who had been their depositors ruined, the Ministry of Finance in 1948 allowed trust companies to run banking as well: Mitsui Trust became Tokyo Trust Bank in July (zaibatsu names were banned) and opened banking business in August, Sumitomo Trust became Fuji Trust Bank the same month. Banking quietly changed the economics — loan proceeds that had gone into other banks’ deposit accounts now stayed in their own. Both listed in Tokyo and Osaka in May 1949.

In June 1952 the ban on zaibatsu names was lifted and the two banks took back the names Mitsui Trust Bank and Sumitomo Trust Bank. The same month brought the Loan Trust Act — legislation Sumitomo Trust had pushed hard for — and Sumitomo ran the first offering, with Mitsui selling in parallel. Rather than fight the city banks for deposits, the trust banks put their pre-war role on a new legal footing: gather the savings of ordinary households on multi-year terms and lend them long. Take-up beat every forecast, and within a little over three years loan trust balances had passed both money trusts and bank deposits.

What the instrument funded was the take-off itself — long-term, stable money for electric power, steel and the rest of the basic industries. Around it the trust banks assembled the other two legs they still stand on. From November 1958 both took up securities agency work — share registries, transfers, dividend calculation — a fee business that owed nothing to the balance sheet. In 1962 came pension trusts, Mitsui with a qualified pension mandate and Sumitomo with the first qualified retirement pension trust. Loan trusts, securities agency and pensions: the shape of the business was set by the early 1960s.

Where the money went then began to move. From about 1960 Mitsui Trust supplied developers with funds and know-how and joined in selling their projects, adding brokerage and appraisal; by the year to March 1972 real estate had overtaken power, steel and chemicals as the largest single share of lending. As heavy industry’s capital spending levelled off, land became the growth asset — the prelude to everything that followed. Branches opened in New York (April 1974) and London (August 1974), and in June 1981 Mitsui launched Big, a maturity-payout loan trust aimed squarely at the postal savings system and the first genuinely new product in the thirty years since the loan trust itself.

In June 1984 Sumitomo Trust accepted Japan’s first land trust, from Nihon Pipe Manufacturing. The scheme let an owner keep title while the trust bank designed, built and ran the property — and when the National Property Act and the Local Autonomy Act were amended in 1986 to admit state and municipal land, Sumitomo took the first public-land trust, from Kumamoto Prefecture. The bank had crossed a line: from the institution that takes land as collateral to the institution that operates it.

The rest of the decade was spent building for an internationalizing, securitizing market. In June 1985 Sumitomo fused its funding, securities and international arms into three pillars — trust business, property development, integrated financial services. Hit, a money trust combining yield with liquidity, followed in December 1985 behind Big. In 1989 Mitsui listed in London and Paris and Sumitomo in London; research and securities subsidiaries were added in 1988 and 1993.

Then the ground moved. When the bubble broke, the property lending that had carried the trust banks since the 1960s turned into the losses that nearly ended them. Mitsui Trust’s large exposures to Azabu Building and Dai-ichi Corporation forced a write-off of $2.0B (¥200bn) in the year to March 1995, while Sumitomo faced the 1993 Financial System Reform Act and a swelling stock of bad assets at the same time. The clean-up ran for the rest of the decade, and it was what eventually made independence impossible for a specialist trust bank.

The bill came due in FY2001: an ordinary loss of $2.7B (¥330bn) and a net loss of $2.3B (¥278bn). Mitsui Trust Bank merged with Chuo Trust to form Chuo Mitsui Trust and moved under Chuo Mitsui Trust Holdings; Sumitomo Trust chose to stay independent, agreeing in 2004 to take over UFJ’s trust business only for UFJ to abandon the deal — a rupture that ended in a ¥2.5 billion settlement. Consolidation among the specialist trust banks had become the condition of survival, but it was not yet clear on whose terms.

The second crisis settled the question. FY2008 brought an ordinary loss of $1.1B (¥117bn) and a net loss of $890.4M (¥92bn); ordinary profit recovered to $891.7M (¥83bn) the following year, but with rates heading to zero a specialist trust bank could not earn its way back to scale. In April 2011 Chuo Mitsui Trust Holdings and Sumitomo Trust Bank merged into Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Holdings, and in April 2012 the group’s three banks were combined into Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank — the largest specialist trust group in Japan.

Scale arrived quickly: ordinary income of $16.6B (¥1.32tn) in FY2011, roughly three times the pre-merger figure, with net profit of $2.1B (¥165bn) and $1.5B (¥160bn) in FY2014. Through the rest of the decade earnings held broadly steady while the group settled into running four businesses at once — banking, asset management, fiduciary and trust services, and real estate. What it had not settled was whether that width was an advantage or something to be pruned.

In December 2020 the group disclosed that its share-registry arm had for years been counting proxy voting cards ahead of the deadline, excluding the ballots that arrived on the closing day itself, and recounted the results for 975 listed companies. The volume involved was tiny — some 3.4 million votes, 0.31% of the total — but forty resolutions saw their approval rates fall by more than a percentage point, because the ballots cast at the last moment are where dissent collects. The business that had looked like quiet back-office plumbing since 1958 turned out to be part of the machinery of Japanese corporate governance.

The larger shift of the 2020s was in what the group is willing to hold on its own balance sheet. Lending secured on property, or on railcars, ties up capital for thin spreads; management chose to move that capital toward fee and investment businesses. In November 2024 Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank sold 85% of Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Loan & Finance to Concordia Financial Group for about $361.1M (¥55bn), and in 2025 exited railcar leasing in North America. President Oyama Kazuya has said lending will be held at around $198.0B (¥30tn) while investment management and administration grow; the freed capital went to the asset-management arm, and in September 2025 Nikko Asset Management was renamed Amova Asset Management. A century after Mitsui Trust opened, the group is trying to be paid for managing other people’s money rather than for lending its own.