ON MAY 15, 1902, Eiichi got up at 6:00 a.m., and as usual, took a morning bath and strolled in the garden. He wrote a poem:

It was the day of his departure on a tour in the United States and Europe. With the backing of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, he left Yokohama aboard the Toyo Kisen ship Amerikamaru, crossing to San Francisco, visiting San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, and New York among other cities. After stays in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere, he planned to take the route via the Suez Canal back to Japan, returning home in late October as the autumn colors were at their height.

It had been 23 years since he had welcomed General Ulysses S. Grant in Tokyo as head of the spanking new Tokyo Chamber of Commercial Law and as representative of the citizens of Tokyo prefecture in 1879. He had continued to lead the Chamber after its renaming as the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce.

This was the most fulfilling time of Eiichi's life. Compared to 1879, when the sole symbol of Japan's modernity was some small newborn banks, in less than two and a half decades Japan's industry had grown immeasurably. Now production was vigorously growing in the manufacture of paper, textiles, fertilizer, and cement as well as in all manner of fields – mining, shipbuilding, maritime transport, railroads, trade, insurance, and so forth. With astonishing energy and stamina, Eiichi had a hand in almost everything that was going on, belying his well-advanced age of 62. His idea of gapponshugi (ethical capitalism), his primary weapon for creating and growing industry, had become firmly established as the conventional way of doing things, and using the joint-stock company approach to enterprise, the wealth of more and more people was being circulated in society, increased, and re-invested, stoking the engines of the country's growth.

Japan's position in the world, too, through revision of the unequal treaties it had concluded with the Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century and victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, had completely changed.