Ōkura Kihachirō

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Baron Ōkura Kihachirō (1837–1928) was a Japanese businessman, investor, and philanthropist who founded the Ōkura zaibatsu, which later became the Taisei Corporation. He also started the Okura Commerce School, which would become Tokyo University of Economics in 1949. Born to a peasant family in Echigo Province, he moved to Edo, ran a grocery from 1857, and later worked as a weapons dealer during the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration. He was an expert in Shindō Munen-ryū, a martial art. Ōkura helped fund the original Imperial Hotel, completed in 1890. His son Kishichirō is credited with introducing the automobile to Japan. Around age 40, he went to Korea after it opened to international trade and, in 1878, established the First Bank of Japan in Busan. He did trade and provisioning for the Japanese military and bought the royal palace building Jaseondang to move to his Tokyo home. A keen collector of Oriental antiques, he founded Japan’s first private museum, the Ōkura Shukokan, in 1917, donating many items, land, and funds. The five-story museum stood on about 10,000 square meters but was damaged in the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. It was rebuilt in 1928 next to the Hotel Ōkura, designed by Itō Chūta, and is recognized as a cultural asset of Japan. The museum houses about 2,000 Oriental artworks and sculptures and 35,000 volumes of Chinese literature, including national treasures such as a wooden statue of Samantabhadra.