Word: tsutsumi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cruel is the strife of brothers," wrote Aristotle. The observation, it seems, applies even in the normally bland and polite world of Japanese business, specifically in the case of the Tsutsumi brothers, whose quiet rivalry has led not only to strife but also to success and enormous wealth. If that is not enough to inspire a crackling TV mini-series, add the fact that at least one of their fortunes rests on the graves of shoguns...
...Seiji Tsutsumi, 61, is the dapper, soft-spoken head of the Seibu Saison Group (1987 sales: $28 billion), a conglomerate of department stores, supermarkets and service organizations. Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, 54, square jawed and hard driving, owns the Seibu Railway group, which operates $400 billion worth of railways, hotels, golf courses and ski resorts. The two are half brothers and have long been locked in intense competition. Last fall the conflict broke into the open when Seiji's Seibu Saison Group acquired the Inter-Continental hotel chain for nearly $2.2 billion, a challenge to Yoshiaki's hotel domain...
...They are as different as water and fire," says a family friend. Seiji and Yoshiaki are the sons of the late Yasujiro Tsutsumi, a cantankerous millionaire who became speaker of the lower house of the Diet after making a fortune in railroads, hotels and department stores. Nicknamed "Pistol" for his buccaneering business methods, Yasujiro bought out impoverished aristocrats who could not pay inheritance taxes during the late '40s and early '50s, put up hotels on the newly acquired land and cockily called the hotel chain Prince. The 484-room Tokyo Prince, for example, is set on the former cemetery...
When the elder Tsutsumi died in 1964, the two brothers inherited dramatically different amounts and parts of their father's empire, parts that fit their sharply divergent personalities and amounts that apparently reflected the feelings between father and sons. The cultured and mild-mannered Seiji, the son of Yasujiro's wife Misao, has established himself as a novelist and an award-winning poet whose early literary work sometimes suggested filial embarrassment and even enmity...
...addition to more familiar resort-development projects at home and abroad. As they cross each ^ other's lines, will one brother decline to book tours to the other's hotels or choose to contract with a different cable or communications company? Tune in for future episodes on the brothers Tsutsumi...