Abstract
The amount of deposits of Mitsui Bank increased rapidly after 1886, leading to a corresponding increase in the amount of loans by the bank. In spite of these favorable circumstances, the bank had held a lot of bad loans because it lacked the ability to review requests effectively. T. Masuda, president of Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, was anxious about the state of Mitsui Bank. He asked K. Inoue, the former Minister of Finance, for help and advised T. Nishimura, vice-president of Mitsui Bank, to place more effort at loan collection. But Nishimura didn't translate Masuda's advice into action, as he was a man of indecision. Consequently, Mitsui Bank lost the confidence of bankers and the amount of nongovernmental deposits decreased from 17, 117 thousand yen to 12, 612 thousand yen in the first half of 1891. Masuda complained to Inoue that Nishimura could not cope with the crisis of Mitsui Bank. Then Inoue asked H. Nakamigawa, president of Sanyo Railway Company, to enter Mitsui Bank and institute reforms. Nakamigawa entered Mitsui Bank in August 1891. He collected outstanding loans to Higashi-Honganji and recieved collateral from other borrowers. But I think it must be emphasized that Mitsui Bank had already been recieving collateral prior to Nakamigawa's entry and that he wrote off bad loans by reducing reserve fund which had been maintained since the bank's establishment in 1876. (It had several kinds of voluntary reserve accounts because its financial status in 1876 was very bad.) He was able to pay back the bank's borrowings from the Bank of Japan by the end of 1892 because the bank's deposits had increased and the amount of governmental bonds which it held decresed.
