Zaibatsu Shipping

Zaibatsu shipping was the merchant fleets of Japan’s pre-1945 industrial conglomerates, the zaibatsu, chiefly Mitsubishi and Mitsui. Mitsubishi’s shipping arm grew from the 1870s and, merged with a rival in 1885, became Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK). Mitsui’s trading house ran Mitsui Bussen Kaisha (later Mitsui O.S.K. Lines). These fleets carried the empire’s trade and were broken up by the Allied occupation’s zaibatsu dissolution after 1945, then partly reformed as keiretsu.