Taikichiro Mori; Led List of World’s Wealthy

Taikichiro Mori, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s richest man, died of heart failure Saturday at a Tokyo hospital, a company official said. He was 88.

Mori, a landowner and president of Mori Building Co., was worth an estimated $13 billion, heading an empire of 83 buildings on some of the world’s most expensive land.

Mori was unpretentious, often seen working at his office wearing a traditional kimono.

In an interview with the Associated Press two years ago, he acknowledged feeling uncomfortable about being labeled the world’s richest man. Forbes accorded him the title in 1991 and 1992.

“I was thankful, but I felt uncomfortable. I have been living and working at my own pace all this time, and now I’m getting all this attention,” he said.

Taking advantage of the rapid postwar economic growth in Japan, Mori built his empire, starting from two buildings owned by his father.

Born in 1904 in Tokyo, Mori graduated from Tokyo Shoka University, now Hitotsubashi University, in 1928. After World War II, he taught trade theory at Yokohama City University, where he became chief of the School of Commerce.

He left academia in his mid-50s to follow his father’s footsteps in real estate. Mori Building was established in 1959 and gradually acquired property in the Toranomon area in downtown Tokyo, near the Imperial Palace.

His Forbes’ ranking was partly because of Japan’s spiraling land prices, which intensified in the 1980s. Mori was critical of skyrocketing land prices and called it Japan’s “most pressing problem.”

“In a place like Tokyo where land is relatively sparse, land prices rise far above their use value. And now this situation is extreme,” he said.

Known as Tokyo’s Ooya-san, a friendly nickname for landlord, Mori was fond of Japanese and Western classical music.

Mori is survived by his wife, Hana, two sons, Minoru and Akira, and a daughter, Aiko.