Yoshisuke Aikawa

Yoshisuke Aikawa, also known as Gisuke Ayukawa (6 November 1880 – 13 February 1967), was a prominent Japanese entrepreneur, businessman and politician, founder and first president of Nissan from 1931 to 1945.

He was born in what is now Yamaguchi, Yamaguchi Prefecture. His mother was a niece of Meiji elder statesman Inoue Kaoru. After graduating in engineering from Tokyo Imperial University in 1903, he joined Shibaura Seisakusho, Toshiba’s predecessor. Despite low pay, he saved enough to travel to the United States and study cast-iron forging techniques. Back in Japan, with Inoue Kaoru’s support and that of other parliamentarians, he established the Tobada Foundry in Kitakyushu Prefecture in 1909. The company is now known as Hitachi Kinzoku, Hitachi Metals Company.

In 1928, he became president of Kuhara Mining Company, now Nippon Mining & Metals, taking it over from his sworn brother Fusanosuke Kuhara. He created the holding company Nihon Sangyo, shortened to Nissan. Kuhara later entered politics and maintained close ties with future prime minister Giichi Tanaka and other influential political and military figures, connections Aikawa used to his advantage.

During the stock-market boom after the 1931 Manchurian Incident, he acquired majority stakes in 132 Nissan subsidiaries to create a new zaibatsu, Nissan Konzern. Nissan Motors then encompassed Isuzu, NEC, Nippon Mining, Nissan Chemicals, Hitachi, Nichiyu, Nichirei, Nissan Marine Insurance and Nissan Insurance. The group included some of Japan’s most technologically advanced companies.

In 1937, at the invitation of his relative Nobusuke Kishi, he moved to Manchukuo and supported the Kwantung Army’s militarist policy for the region’s economic and industrial development. He moved Nissan’s headquarters there, making it the core of the Manchurian Industrial Development Company, a new zaibatsu jointly owned by Nissan and the regional government.

As founder and president, he directed industrial activity in Manchukuo and helped implement two five-year plans during the 1930s, following economic and production doctrines associated with military ideologue Naoki Hoshino. Yet he departed from Hoshino’s original concept in favour of a more monopolistic approach, arguing that Manchukuo’s economy was too primitive for free-market capitalism. He also obtained bank loans from American industrialists to support it, provoking heated controversy and political disapproval in the United States.

Although his economic views aligned with Japan’s pro-army policy, his political views did not always do so. He strongly opposed the Tripartite Pact and predicted that Britain and France would defeat Nazi Germany. He supported the Fugu Plan for settling Jewish refugees in Manchukuo. In 1942, at the Kwantung Army’s instigation, he resigned and returned to Japan.

After Japan surrendered, American occupation authorities arrested him as a suspected war criminal. He spent twenty months in Sugamo Prison and was released before trial. During his imprisonment, the Nissan zaibatsu was dissolved.

After release, he played a key role in Japan’s economic reconstruction and established a commercial bank to lend to small businesses. He was president of Teikoku Oil and the geological company Japan Petroleum, and in 1953 was elected to the Diet’s House of Councillors. With the protection of Kishi, later prime minister, he influenced economic legislation and policy as leader of Chuseiren, a pressure group that became the main small-business association in the 1960s.

Aikawa died of acute gallbladder inflammation in 1967. His grave is at Tama Cemetery near Tokyo.