"Cruel is the strife of brothers," wrote Aristotle. The observation, it seems, applies even in the normally bland and polite world of Japanese business, specifically in the case of the Tsutsumi brothers, whose quiet rivalry has led not only to strife but also to success and enormous wealth. If that is not enough to inspire a crackling TV mini-series, add the fact that at least one of their fortunes rests on the graves of shoguns.
Seiji Tsutsumi, 61, is the dapper, soft-spoken head of the Seibu Saison Group (1987 sales: $28 billion), a conglomerate of department stores, supermarkets and service organizations. Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, 54, square jawed and hard driving, owns the Seibu Railway group, which operates $400 billion worth of railways, hotels, golf courses and ski resorts. The two are half brothers and have long been locked in intense competition. Last fall the conflict broke into the open when Seiji's Seibu Saison Group acquired the Inter-Continental hotel chain for nearly $2.2 billion, a challenge to Yoshiaki's hotel domain.
"They are as different as water and fire," says a family friend. Seiji and Yoshiaki are the sons of the late Yasujiro Tsutsumi, a cantankerous millionaire who became speaker of the lower house of the Diet after making a fortune in railroads, hotels and department stores. Nicknamed "Pistol" for his buccaneering business methods, Yasujiro bought out impoverished aristocrats who could not pay inheritance taxes during the late '40s and early '50s, put up hotels on the newly acquired land and cockily called the hotel chain Prince. The 484-room Tokyo Prince, for example, is set on the former cemetery of the Tokugawas, the shoguns who ruled Japan for 265 years before the Meiji Restoration began in 1868.
When the elder Tsutsumi died in 1964, the two brothers inherited dramatically different amounts and parts of their father's empire, parts that fit their sharply divergent personalities and amounts that apparently reflected the feelings between father and sons. The cultured and mild-mannered Seiji, the son of Yasujiro's wife Misao, has established himself as a novelist and an award-winning poet whose early literary work sometimes suggested filial embarrassment and even enmity.
Yoshiaki's life took a less refined path. His mother was one of Yasujiro's mistresses. This illegitimate son was the favorite, and he still praises his father as "the greatest entrepreneur I've ever met." While Seiji was merely given control of a money-losing department store, Yoshiaki inherited not only the railway and real estate portions of the empire but also his father's political clout: he is close to Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, for example, and backed him in his fight for the leadership in 1987. A rugged sportsman who owns the national-champion baseball team, the Seibu Lions, Yoshiaki flies around the country aboard his jet helicopter to visit his properties and shows up on lists of the world's wealthiest people. He has an estimated net worth of $18.9 billion, compared with Seiji's $1.8 billion.