Succeeding the founder at 32: Tokyo, a licence, and a spun-off fund arm (1961)

A modernisation that could only be done from the outside

What Kato Seiichi took on in June 1961 was a head office only just moved to Tokyo and a market that had peaked the month before. Capital had grown from ¥180,000 at incorporation to ¥1.5 billion, but the increases and the relocation had only given the firm the outward form of a national broker; the substance of the business remained as it had been under his father. That the thirty-two-year-old heir defined modernisation as two visible things — separating the investment-trust arm and putting up a head-office building — was, it appears, because those were the only places he could begin.

It is hard to argue that what he built in those seven years became strength. At the 1973 listing, 71.1% of revenue was still brokerage commissions: a structure in which income thinned the moment trading volumes fell, unchanged even after passing through the securities depression. The 1968 licence, too, was a defensive result in the sense that the firm remained while weaker houses withdrew. Even so, that a shop from Mie ended up on the surviving side of a regulatory replacement rather than the vanishing side was itself the achievement of those seven years.