What Is Dai ichi Mutual Life Insurance – Definition

Dai ichi Mutual Life Insurance (Dai ichi Seimei Hoken Sōgo gaisha) was founded on September 15, 1902, by Tsuneta Yano, and it is the oldest mutual insurance company in Japan. It took its name from the Dai ichi Bank Ltd. that had been established in June 1873, the first banking institution established in Japan (when it was called the First National Bank). In 1896 it became a joint stock commercial bank as the Dai ichi Bank; the insurance company was established six years later when Tsuneta Yano published a small booklet entitled Characteristics of My Company. The company prospered and in 1938 moved its headquarters to its current location in Chiyoda, the business district of Tokyo. In 1945, its headquarters became the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers under General Douglas MacArthur. Later Dai ichi built a new 20 story building for the company’s policy service department and computer systems section.

During the 1960s, Dai ichi Mutual Life Insurance Company started to expand into other parts of Asia, but faced problems in some areas owing to the lingering resentment toward the Japanese in parts of the region they had occupied during World War II. This led Dai ichi to join the Foundation for the Advancement of Life Insurance Around the World (FALIA) in 1970. Five years later, the company established its first overseas office in New York City, initially to help staff study how the U.S. insurance market works, and later to help with the promotion of business in the United States. Seven years later it opened an office in London. The company continued to prosper and in 1990 invested in the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, the first time a Japanese company had provided capital for a leading U.S. insurance company. Three years later, in 1993, the company finished its DN Tower 21 as its new head office.

The Great Hanshin (or Kobe) earthquake on January 17, 1995, listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the costliest natural disaster to befall any one country, resulted in such a vast number of claims that this led to the simplification of the entire claims settlement procedures, and in the following year the company set up a subsidiary, the Dai ichi Property and Casualty Insurance Co. Ltd., and in 1997 the Daiichi Life Research Institute, Inc. After years of competition, in 1999 the company agreed on business cooperation with the Industrial Bank of Japan (now the Mizuho Financial Group), and in 2000, there was an agreement to form a business alliance with the Sompo Japan Insurance and with Aflac.

In 2001 Dai ichi won the Japan Quality Award, being the first company from the financial and insurance industry to get this award. In recent years the company has continued to expand, and in 2007 it bought Bao Minh CMG and started trading in Vietnam as Dai ichi Life Insurance Company of Vietnam, Ltd. The Daiichi Mutual Life Insurance Company employs about 54,400 people (2005), with total capital of $21,425 million (2006) and total assets of $276,552 million (2006). It now has about 8.65 million policy holders.