Sibling Rivalry May Fuel Innkeeper-to-Be’s Drive

While a student in the late 1940s at Tokyo University, Seiji Tsutsumi enraged his capitalist father by demonstrating on behalf of left-wing causes. He paid a hefty price. When father Yasujiro died in 1964, he left the bulk of his real estate and transportation empire to Seiji’s reportedly illegitimate half-brother Yoshiaki, whom Forbes magazine has identified as the world’s richest man.

But Seiji did all right, inheriting a department store chain that he diversified successfully into a $22-billion-a-year empire of grocery and convenience stores, restaurants, resorts, Japanese hotels and real estate development.

His plunge Friday into the global hotel market, with his $2.27-billion purchase of Inter-Continental Hotels, is the kind of capitalist move that might have gotten him back into his father’s good graces.

Anomaly Among Businessmen

It is also a sign that 60-year-old Seiji Tsutsumi is game to enter into more direct competition with his far more conservative sibling, 54, who controls a giant, well-established Japanese chain called Prince Hotels and is developing resorts. The half-brothers are legendary for their feuding in Japan and are said to speak only rarely to each other.

In Japan, the intellectual Seiji Tsutsumi, a published novelist and poet, is viewed as a bit of an anomaly. “Seiji is regarded as a cultured man and yet a successful businessman,” said Toshiaki Ogasawara, publisher of the Japan Times newspaper, who was reached in Newport Beach. “It’s very unusual to find a gifted person with two (such different) sorts of talents.”

John Hasegawa, a principal at Korn/Ferry International, a Los Angeles-based executive search firm, said: “Seiji is a different person from his brother. He is very intellectual (and) takes the literary approach to things. Yoshiaki is more conservative.”

Seiji Tsutsumi, for example, served seven years on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His published works, under the pseudonym Takashi Tsujii, include a collection called “Alien” that won a Japanese poetry prize. A resident of Tokyo, he is director of the Japan PEN Club, a literary group, and has held a number of civic posts.

But it is largely his successful building of a 100-company empire called Seibu Saison Group that has made his a household name in Japan. Tsutsumi started his business career in 1948 with the Seibu Railway Co., a bus and railway transport business founded by his father. After World War II, his father went into debt to buy ancestral lands from Japanese aristocrats who were forced to sell to survive. Those properties became the core of the country’s Prince Hotels chain.

Seiji Tsutsumi moved to the Seibu Department Store chain in 1955. After his father’s death, he showed that he, too, could be a good capitalist. Observers speculate that much of the empire-building drive came from his resentment of his half-brother.

Interestingly, although Forbes magazine has twice reported that Yoshiaki (whose assets Forbes estimated at $18.9 billion) is Yasujiro Tsutsumi’s illegitimate son by one of many mistresses and that Seiji is the legitimate son, observers say the question of which son is legitimate is a matter of debate in Japan.