Yasuda Zenjirō
Yasuda Zenjirō was a Japanese entrepreneur from Toyama, Etchu Province who founded the Yasuda zaibatsu. He donated the Yasuda Auditorium to the University of Tokyo. He was a maternal great-grandfather of Yoko Ono via his daughter Teruko, and adoptive son, Yasuda Zenzaburō.
Early life
Yasuda Zenjirō was the son of a poor samurai and a member of the Yasuda clan in Etchu Province.Zenjirō moved to Edo at the age of 17 and began working in a money changing house.
Career
In 1863, he started providing tax-farming services to the Tokugawa Shogunate. After the Meiji Restoration, he provided the same services to the new Meiji government. Yasuda profited from the delay between the collection of taxes and their forwarding to the government. He greatly magnified his wealth by buying up depreciated Meiji paper money that the government subsequently exchanged for gold.Yasuda helped establish the Third National Bank in 1876. Later, in 1880, Yasuda set up the Yasuda Bank and the Yasuda Mutual Life Insurance Company, which he organized into a zaibatsu holding company. In 1893, the Yasuda zaibatsu absorbed the Tokyo Fire Insurance Company.
Yasuda was among the best financiers that Japan had; however he was not adventurous and hardly expanded the business beyond finance. Most of the industrial houses associated with Yasuda were actually those that Asano Soichiro started, whom Yasuda trusted and provided loans to. More accurately, therefore, they belonged to Asano zaibatsu and were merely affiliated to Yasuda Zaibatsu.
Philanthropy
In his later years, he donated the Yasuda Auditorium to the Tokyo Imperial University and the Hibiya Kokaido hall.He owned a lot of land in Tokyo which was later used as Yasuda Garden, Yasuda Gakuen, and Doai Memorial Hospital.