He was born the third son of a merchant family in Shibata, Echigo Province (Shibata, Niigata). His childhood name was Tsurukichi. The family prospered dealing in medicines, sugar, salt and more. While studying at a private school, he took an interest in comic verse such as kyōka from boyhood, and it remained a lifelong pleasure; he even later published a kyōka collection.
Angered when, at home, the conduct of an acquaintance's family forced his family's sake shop to stop trading, he decided to go to Edo. There, relying on kyōka friends, he helped in a salted-goods business and then worked as an apprentice at a dried bonito shop. Around this time he became friends with Yasuda Zenjirō, the future banker.
With money saved during his apprenticeship, he went independent and opened his own dried-goods shop. Starting from a small store, he gained experience as a merchant. But after seeing the black ships at Yokohama in the last years of the shogunate, he decided that an age of weapons was coming, closed his dried-goods shop and became an apprentice at a gun shop.
He opened the gun shop Ōkuraya in Kanda. Lacking money to keep stock, he went to the foreign settlement in Yokohama each time he got an order and bought guns from foreign merchants. While many dealers sold poor guns at high prices, he made a point of delivering good goods quickly and cheaply and won trust.
When the Boshin War began, he became a purveyor to the new government's army and handled supplies for the troops heading to the northeast. This deepened his ties with the government, and later he handled military supplies in the Taiwan Expedition, the Satsuma Rebellion, and the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars, building a great fortune.
As the first private citizen to do so, he set out on a tour of Western economies. He visited cities in America, Britain, France and elsewhere and is said to have met Ōkubo Toshimichi and others of the Iwakura Mission in London. The year after returning he founded the Ōkura-gumi Shōkai and launched into foreign trade; it was also an early Japanese company to open branches abroad.
He took part in founding the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and many other new ventures. At an assembly concerned with running the city of Tokyo he had met Shibusawa Eiichi, and the two remained close for fifty years, joining forces in founding many companies.
The Imperial Hotel, which he had helped found with Shibusawa Eiichi and others, opened in Hibiya, Tokyo. It was Japan's leading hotel for entertaining foreign guests. Ōkura later founded the Ōkura Doboku-gumi (today's Taisei Corporation) and took part in founding companies in a wide range of fields, from railways and buildings to beer.
With his own money he founded the Ōkura Commercial School in Tokyo, the origin of today's Tokyo Keizai University. Ōkura was keen on founding schools and later opened commercial schools in Osaka and on the Korean Peninsula too. He sought to put the wealth earned in business to use for education. The same year he also made his third trip to the West.
To display the Japanese and East Asian art he had collected over many years, he opened the Ōkura Shūkokan on his estate, considered Japan's first private art museum. His collecting is said to have begun when, in early Meiji, he bought an old building that was about to be sold to foreigners.
Moved by Prince Chichibu's climb of Mt. Tateyama, he is said to have been carried in a palanquin and on a back frame to the summit of Mt. Akaishi in the Southern Alps. Climbing at nearly ninety drew attention. Known for his bold character and keen on pastimes such as Itchūbushi singing, he was also often harshly criticized as a political merchant.
He died of illness in Tokyo. More than a thousand wreaths are said to have been sent to his funeral at his Akasaka residence. The companies he founded or nurtured spread across many fields, including construction, hotels, food and chemicals, and firms descended from them, such as Taisei Corporation and Hotel Okura, still exist today.
Ōkubo ToshimichiYasuda ZenjirōShibusawa Eiichi
Inoue KaoruItagaki TaisukeTani TatekiSanjō SanetomiŌkuma ShigenobuYamagata AritomoEdward S. MorseGoto Shojiro
People of the Meiji period ・ People by period
Based on facts found in textbooks and biographies. Uncertain points are marked as such.