Takuma Dan as an Industrialist
Takuma Dan as a Mitsui chairman
Dan's Role in Japan's Industrialization
As it turns out, both Honma and Dan ultimately managed to fulfill their hopes of playing central roles in Japan’s industrialization, though perhaps in some unexpected ways for the latter. While both of them found employment with the Japanese government’s Ministry of Public Works, Dan was almost immediately sent “back” to Fukuoka, to join a group of engineers who were developing the then government-owned Miike Mine. This was not a welcome development for Dan, as he had hoped to play a more direct role in policy-making in Tokyo, the nation’s capital.
Within a few years, however, the mine was sold to Mitsui, a venerable merchant house that dated its origins back to the seventeenth century and was in the process of transforming itself into what would become one of modern Japan’s most powerful financial and industrial conglomerates. Recognizing Dan’s talent as a mining engineer, Mitsui hired him as the chief manager of Miike at the same time that the company gained the ownership of the mine in 1888. This marked the beginning of Dan’s career at Mitsui that culminated in 1914, when he was appointed as the chairman of the board of the entire Mitsui enterprise.
Congratulatory card to Takuma Dan from MIT, 1929
Just four years before he took the helm of Mitsui, Dan accompanied Takamine Mitsui, the hereditary head of the house of Mitsui and the president of the conglomerate, on a visit to MIT—a visit that was noted in the October 1910 edition of the Technology Review. Eleven years later, Dan arrived at MIT once again, this time not only as the Mitsui chairman but also as the leader of a delegation of Japanese corporate executives to the United States and Britain. On this visit, Dan was invited to give an address to the entire MIT community, the transcript of which is included in the Takuma Dan papers in the Distinctive Collections. In his speech, Dan recalled his studies at MIT and expressed his gratitude to the “spirit of Technology” that he was inculcated with as a student, declaring that his alma mater was “no longer Massachusetts Institute of Technology“ but that “it is now Institute of Technology of the world.”
The Distinctive Collections includes several correspondences between Dan and MIT during the 1920s, demonstrating how MIT sought to cultivate Dan as a prominent alumnus and how Dan, in turn, sought to maintain his ties with the Institute despite his growing responsibilities. In fact, Dan had already worked with Honma and other Japanese graduates of MIT to establish the Technology Association of Japan (present: MIT Club of Japan) in 1911, serving as its first president. In 1929, MIT President Samuel W. Stratton and the Institute’s Executive Committee sent a special congratulatory card to Dan, upon the latter’s elevation to the Japanese peerage.