Michael S. Strickland
The Internationalist Spring 2022 Vol 68
Yashiro-san visited Nishimachi and explored the interior renovations of the Matsukata House, in the Spring, 2022.
Nishimachi head Karen O’Neill talks with retired oilman and banker Masamoto Yashiro about the value of having more than one language in your back pocket.
In 2004, Masamoto Yashiro, who was then CEO of Shinsei Bank, received, in quick succession, two communiqués in English from China, one from a bank, the other from a bank regulator, both requesting that he join their respective boards. “Wasn’t there a conflict of interest?” asks Nishimachi head Karen O’Neill ’78 who is meeting with Mr. Yashiro on the occasion of his retirement, at the age of 93, from Nishimachi’s Board of Trustees.
“I asked someone who knew China very well,” Mr. Yashiro laughs in response. “‘What do I do? One offer comes from the regulator; the other, from the regulated. How can I be on both sides?’ He replied, ‘It’s not your problem. They will solve the problem.’” They did, and Mr. Yashiro was soon taking monthly trips to Beijing as one of two independent directors (独立董事, or dúlì dǒngshì in modern Mandarin) of China Construction Bank, with occasional detours to the Council of International Advisers of the China Banking Regulatory Commission.
Polyglot Mr. Yashiro’s exposure to the Chinese language, however, began long before his double entry into the China banking world. Like many Japanese people of his generation, Mr. Yashiro began learning kanbun (漢文), Classical Chinese—the language of official documents from the Nara period till the early 1950s—and kanshi (漢詩), Chinese poetry, in middle school. Kanshi and kanbun were among Mr. Yashiro’s favorite subjects during his time at Tōkyō Toritsu Daiichi Chūgakkō (東京都立第一中学校), or Tokyo Prefecture First Middle School. “I can write and read almost anything,” he elaborates when O’Neill asks about his current facility with the language, “but speaking takes practice, and I don’t practice.”
Mr. Yashiro’s other favorite subject was English. “It’s quite interesting,” he says, “but all through the war, my school—this was probably unique in this country at the time—never stopped teaching English.” That is, when the school actually had classes. For Mr. Yashiro’s middle-school years coincided with the Second World War.
“During my middle-school years,” Mr. Yashiro explains, “we didn’t study very much. We had to work in factories, either at the one built in the school, or go out to other places to work. Of the five-year period of middle school, I think I really studied only two and a half years at most.” One place Mr. Yashiro worked was at a depot for the Japanese navy. Another was in a factory for a company near Ōmori, in what was then Tokyo’s Kamata ward.
“That company was called Tokyo Keiki (東京計器), or Tokyo Instrument,” Mr. Yashiro says, “which, in the pre-war years, was a joint venture, or at least had a very close relationship, with an American company.” That company, a producer of marine navigation equipment, was the Sperry Corporation, founded in 1910 by Elmer Ambrose Sperry in Brooklyn. Mr. Yashiro’s task at Tokyo Keiki’s Kamata factory was inspecting gyroscopes. That task came to an abrupt end when the factory was destroyed in an air raid in the spring of 1945.
Yashiro-san at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for Yashiro Media Center, 2007
Before then, however, a small incident occurred which buttressed Mr. Yashiro’s desire to keep learning English. “During our lunch break,” he says, “after eating, a classmate and I would go up onto the factory roof to study. One day we were sitting there reading an English book and a military officer assigned to the factory came by. He didn’t say anything bad to us; instead, he said, ‘Oh, that’s good—you should keep studying English!’”
At war’s end, Mr. Yashiro and his elder brother were the only two survivors in the family. His father, mother, and sister died, Mr. Yashiro specifies, “not because of the air raids, but because of sickness—they couldn’t get enough medical attention.” Bereft of all but the small house he had lived in with his family in Tokyo, Mr. Yashiro considered quitting school and working full time. But one of his teachers convinced him he should go to high school. Fortunately, his mother’s younger brother offered him a chance to continue his studies if he came to live with him in Kyoto.
At Third High School in Kyoto, Mr. Yashiro studied rika (理科), science as opposed to bunka (文化) belles lettres. “It so happened,” Mr. Yashiro says, “that I was assigned to class number six, where French was taught as the primary foreign language. So, from Monday to Saturday, we learned French. By the end of the year, I could read some of the old classic French books—Balzac’s Le Lys dans la vallée, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Descartes’s Discours de la méthode.”
In addition to literary classroom French, Mr. Yashiro practiced speaking at the Institut Franco-Japonais du Kansai, and took private lessons in conversation and composition. “I came to know a young Frenchman,” he says, “who was a member of the French embassy in Tokyo. He was studying at Kyoto University and he and I would go around Kyoto together sightseeing and I’d speak French with him. I also came to know a French-Canadian Catholic priest who always spoke French with me.”
While Mr. Yashiro’s verbal and written skills in French waxed superbly during these Francophile high-school years, his English waned, not to be revived until 1950 when he began studying law at Kyoto University on scholarship. “But the scholarship was not enough to live on,” he says. “So I had to work.”
That work—part-time night-shift telephone switchboard operator—was an apt, well-paid, but rather lonely supplement to the lively discussions in the university’s English Speaking Society he frequented and the private conversations with the tutor who helped him overcome his French accent. “Near Lake Biwa, in Ōtsu city,” Mr. Yashiro explains, “there was a hydroponic farm built for the U.S. Army in Korea. I started working there my freshman year. Two or three times a week, I’d go there at six in the evening, and finish at six the next morning. I’d sit there by myself, with plenty of time to study, except when calls came in from American military people in Korea, ordering vegetables to be sent from Japan.”
It was also during this time, even before he began working for an American oil company in 1958, that Mr. Yashiro first set off on the internationalist cross-cultural career neatly encapsulated by his famous statement, “I do not think in terms of nationality or national borders.” In 1952, a grant from the Committee for a Free Asia enabled him to attend, as vice-president of the International Student Association of Japan, that year’s congress of the National Student Association at Indiana University. In 1953, he participated in a UNESCO-sponsored summer camp in Kristiansand, Norway. And in 1954, he started a master’s program in international relations at Tokyo University.
Yashiro-san and Karen O'Neill, 2021
“During the time I was a graduate student,” Mr. Yashiro continues, “I was also working at a research institute near Tokyo Station called Seikai Keizai Chōsakai (世界経済調査会), the World Economy Research Institute. This had been set up in wartime to study Japan’s economy, the U.S. economy, and so on, to figure out how long Japan could hold out in a fight against the U.S. and allies.”
During his first year in graduate school, Mr. Yashiro married the “headstrong” woman, Yoko, whom a middle-school friend had introduced him to. In 1956, Mr. Yashiro matriculated into the doctoral program, and Yoko gave birth to the couple’s first daughter Chizuko. One day in 1957, one of Yoko’s American friends invited the couple to a party in Nishiazabu. There, Mr. Yashiro met someone from Standard Vacuum Oil Company, and not long after, upon his first visit to the company’s offices in Yokohama, was offered a job there. A year after this meeting, Mr. Yashiro finished his thesis at Tokyo University and started working for Stanvac on June 1, 1958. He oversaw the company’s transformation to Esso Standard Sekiyu, becoming a member of the board of directors in 1964 when he was 35, then, a few years after the company became Esso Sekiyu, he became its president in 1986, a position he held until he retired in 1989 at the age of 60.
Of the thirty-one years Mr. Yashiro worked for this U.S.-owned oil company, nine and a half were spent on U.S. soil, the rest in Japan. It was during one of their inter-American lulls that Mr. Yashiro was inspired to send Chizuko and his second daughter Michiyo, born in 1961, to the place he calls “the only reputable school where one can go.”
“In the early 1960s,” Mr. Yashiro explains, “I was talking to a neighbor, saying, ‘I want my daughters to learn English and not go to a Japanese school, because I don’t like Japanese schools. They just try to get students to memorize everything the teacher says. They never try to instill the students with an ability to think for themselves. I want to send my children to some type of international school.’ The neighbor replied, ‘Well, there’s one school nearby, it’s a community nursery school. And there’s also Nishimachi.’ So naturally I started sending Michiyo to this community nursery school, and Chizuko to Nishimachi. She started Nishimachi in fifth grade. Actually, because her English was limited at the time, she entered fourth grade, and the next year she jumped to sixth. She went to Nishimachi for fourth, sixth, and seventh grades, while Michiyo started in kindergarten.”
Michiyo ’76, in turn, sent her children Yoko ’13, Shingo ’12, and Koji ’12 to this venerable campus that fosters, to paraphrase Nishimachi founder Tané Matsukata, international yet independent thinkers able to maintain their special identities while sharing, living, and learning together. A fitting heritage, indeed, from Yashiro-ojīsan, retired banker and oilman whose internationalist career founded on the early and continued study of several languages—Chinese, English, French, Japanese—truly epitomizes what Karen O’Neill calls “the value of having more than one language in your back pocket.”