Mitsubishi Goshi Kaisha (Mitsubishi Corporation)

Mitsubishi Goshi Kaisha was the holding company of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, one of Japan's most powerful industrial conglomerates. Mitsubishi began with the shipping business run in the 1870s by Iwasaki Yatarō of Tosa. It acquired the Takashima coal mine at Nagasaki in 1881, leased the government's Nagasaki shipyard in 1884 and bought it in 1887, and purchased the Hashima coal mine in 1890, shifting from shipping to mining and shipbuilding. When the Commercial Code came into force in 1893, Mitsubishi-sha was reorganised as Mitsubishi Goshi Kaisha, a limited partnership funded by the Iwasaki family, with Iwasaki Hisaya as president.

Iwasaki Koyata, the fourth president from 1916, turned the operating divisions into separate joint-stock companies: Mitsubishi Shipbuilding and Mitsubishi Paper in 1917, Mitsubishi Trading and Mitsubishi Mining in 1918, and Mitsubishi Bank in 1919. The partnership itself became a holding company, so that from 1918 the Hashima and Takashima mines legally belonged to Mitsubishi Mining. The partnership was reorganised as Mitsubishi-sha K.K. in 1937 and renamed Mitsubishi Honsha in 1943.

During WWII, Mitsubishi operated coal mines, shipyards (including the Nagasaki shipyard that built the battleship Musashi), aircraft factories that produced the Zero fighter, and numerous other heavy industrial facilities. As domestic labour ran short, the group's mines and plants employed forced laborers — workers mobilised from Korea, Chinese labourers brought to Japan, and Allied POWs — at multiple sites, including the Hashima Island coal mines. The numbers, treatment and degree of coercion remain disputed among Japan, South Korea and China, and how this history should be presented became a point of contention when Hashima was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2015 as part of the Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution.

After the defeat GHQ ordered the dissolution of the zaibatsu. Koyata at first resisted voluntary dissolution but died in December 1945; Mitsubishi Honsha was dissolved in 1946 and companies such as Mitsubishi Trading were broken up. After the occupation the former affiliates resumed the Mitsubishi name and kept in touch through a presidents' council, forming today's Mitsubishi Group, which has no holding company. The Hashima mine operated until its closure in 1974, and the island's buildings are now a visitor site managed by Nagasaki City.