Suzuki Yone (1852-1938)
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senzenwomen(Short one today, sorry, short on both information and time)
Suzuki Yone was born in 1852 to a lacquer artisan in Himeji, west of Kobe. At age 26, she married the merchant Suzuki Iwajiro and bore him three sons, one of whom died young. Suzuki had founded the Suzuki Shoten trading company, which dealt in camphor and sugar. After Iwajiro’s death in 1894, she dismissed the urgings of her brother and her husband’s peers that she close his company down, instead running it herself along with the manager Kaneko Naokichi. (As a young man Kaneko had quit his job on a regular basis, finding Iwajiro’s bad temper and the boring work he was assigned intolerable; it was Yone who noted his ability and coaxed him to keep on coming back.)
In the early 1900s, their business expanded to cover real estate, steel, oil, flour, peppermint, and shipping; Yone became one of the richest women in the world. Along with Hirooka Asako, she is considered one of the great female industrialists of the period. Newspapers reported that her employees looked up to her as a mother. She was not invariably popular; in the 1918 Rice Riots the company headquarters was burned in protest for its role in pushing up the price of rice. In 1917 she founded the Kobe Girls’ Commercial School, in order to help young women in the region succeed in business.
After thriving for decades, Suzuki Shoten failed in the 1927 financial collapse, although both their Group companies and the children of Yone’s sons have continued to play major roles in Japanese business. Yone lived quietly and died in 1938.
Sources
https://www.ytv.co.jp/oiesan/ (Japanese) This is the site for a drama about Yone’s life (based on the biographical novel by Tamaoka Kaoru); obviously fictionalized, but the characters are fun to look at
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle-yone-suzuki-19/15161140/ (English) Contemporary newspaper article
Suzuki Yone was born in 1852 to a lacquer artisan in Himeji, west of Kobe. At age 26, she married the merchant Suzuki Iwajiro and bore him three sons, one of whom died young. Suzuki had founded the Suzuki Shoten trading company, which dealt in camphor and sugar. After Iwajiro’s death in 1894, she dismissed the urgings of her brother and her husband’s peers that she close his company down, instead running it herself along with the manager Kaneko Naokichi. (As a young man Kaneko had quit his job on a regular basis, finding Iwajiro’s bad temper and the boring work he was assigned intolerable; it was Yone who noted his ability and coaxed him to keep on coming back.)
In the early 1900s, their business expanded to cover real estate, steel, oil, flour, peppermint, and shipping; Yone became one of the richest women in the world. Along with Hirooka Asako, she is considered one of the great female industrialists of the period. Newspapers reported that her employees looked up to her as a mother. She was not invariably popular; in the 1918 Rice Riots the company headquarters was burned in protest for its role in pushing up the price of rice. In 1917 she founded the Kobe Girls’ Commercial School, in order to help young women in the region succeed in business.
After thriving for decades, Suzuki Shoten failed in the 1927 financial collapse, although both their Group companies and the children of Yone’s sons have continued to play major roles in Japanese business. Yone lived quietly and died in 1938.
Sources
https://www.ytv.co.jp/oiesan/ (Japanese) This is the site for a drama about Yone’s life (based on the biographical novel by Tamaoka Kaoru); obviously fictionalized, but the characters are fun to look at
https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle-yone-suzuki-19/15161140/ (English) Contemporary newspaper article
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