A Granddaughter of Mitsubishi Founder
The Mitsubishi company syndicate was established by Yataro Iwasaki (1835-1885). His eldest son Hisaya Iwasaki (1865-1955) also led the Mitsubishi industrial conglomerate.
Before WWII, there were 10 or so zaibatsu (industrial conglomerate) groups in Japan. Mitsubishi zaibatsu is one of them. These business groups in total accounted for 35.2% in terms of a ratio of capital paid-in by all the businesses in the Empire of Japan. So, the Iwasaki family was super rich.
Hisaya Iwasaki had a daughter called Miki (1901-1980). She was expected marry a son of a super rich family or a prominent politician. But she tried to be a Christian and married a Christian diplomat named Renzo Sawada in 1922. Then Miki Sawada traveled and lived in various cities, such as Buenos Aires, Beijing, London, Paris, New York, etc. between 1923 and 1936. She got many friends abroad, including an African-American singer Josephine Baker.
During WWII, Miki was in Japan, but she was regraded as a pro-American Japanese to be put under scrutiny by the special police. After the war ended in 1945, she started to take care of orphan children each of whom was born between a Japanese mother and a US soldier. She built a children's nursing home, called Elizabeth Saunders Home, in premises of her vacation house in Oiso Town, on Sagami Bay facing the Pacific Ocean.
What served as the catalyst of her action was her encounter with a dead baby with the black skin. When she was in a crowded train running toward Tokyo one day after WWII, something fell on her from a rack of a car. It was a dead infant wrapped in newspaper sheets. Then police came to check the incident. But they doubted whether Miki was the mother of the dead baby apparently from a Japanese woman and an Africa-American soldier. Though it was later found that there was a Japanese woman in the train who was the mother of the dead baby, this happening moved Miki so deeply. She thought it was a sign from Heaven. Accordingly, she decided to take care of those unhappy infants who were born between Japanese women and American soldiers.
She used her won funds to build the Home, but she also asked contribution from people in various sectors not only in Japan but also in foreign countries. Miki named the Home after one of British contributors: Elizabeth Saunders. Miki nursed and brought up total 2,000 children who were abandoned by their parents.
However it is said that her House was not welcomed for some time after its establishment. Both the Japanese Government and the US military authorities stationed in Japan after WWII did not like to recognize existence of orphans of mixed blood between Japanese women and US soldiers. So, in 1949 Miki and her husband traveled to the US to solicit for a contribution. Miki Sawada met an American actress Grace Patricia Kelly who became a friend of the Sawadas'. In 1953 Miki founded a primary school and a junior-high school for children living in Elizabeth Saunders Home.
As time went by her humanitarian work came to be widely known to the Japanese public. Even a movie was made about children living in her facilities. Miki Sawada, a grand-daughter of the founder of the Mitsubishi company syndicate of Japan, died of a heart disease in Mallorca, Spain, in 1980 during her lecture tour in Spain.
It is estimated today that the Mitsubishi Group has total assets of $2 trillion while the Toyota Group $300 billion. But it is unknown how much a granddaughter of the founder of Mitsubishi zaibatsu accumulated in Heaven.
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