was a Japanese businessman, politician and educator, who built the Tokyu Group into one of the leading corporate groups in Japan. He briefly served as Minister of Transportation and Communications in 1944. Prior to his business career, he worked as a government official in the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Transport. He founded the Tōyoko Commercial Girl's School and the Gotō Ikueikai. Biography Early life and career Gotō was born as Keita Kobayashi on 18 April 1882, in the village of Tonoto in Chiisagata, Nagano Prefecture (present-day Tonoto, Aoki, Nagano Prefecture), the second son of Kobayashi Kikuemon and his wife Toshie. He attended Aoki Normal Elementary School and Urazato Upper Elementary School. After graduating from Matsumoto High School, he worked as a substitute teacher at Aoki Elementary School through the recommendation of his former teacher Kobayashi Naojirō. In 1902, he entered Tokyo Higher Normal School, what is now the University of Tsukuba. After graduating, he briefly worked as an English teacher at Mie Prefectural Yokkaichi Commercial School in 1906. In 1907, he entered the law department of the Tokyo Imperial University. After graduating, he entered the Ministry of Agriculture, beginning a career as a government official in 1911, at the relatively late age of 29. Three years later he transferred to the Ministry of Transport, where he was involved in supervising the national railway system. In 1912, while still working in the Ministry of Agriculture, he married Kume Machiyo, the eldest daughter of the engineer Kume Taminosuke who designed the Nijūbashi Bridge. He became the heir to the Gotō family, a former samurai family of the Numata Domain related to the Kume family, at the request of her family, and subsequently assumed the family name Gotō. Business career In 1920, Gotō was offered the post of Director of the Musashi Railway, a struggling company in need of capital to finance its expansion. He accepted and resigned from his post in the ministry the same year. In 1922, he founded the Meguro Kamata Electric Railway, at the age of 40. By 1924, he had acquired a controlling interest in the Musashi Railway, using the profits from other railway ventures in the Tokyo area. This was the first of many acquisitions in which Gotō bought weak companies and transformed them into profitable members of a growing railway and real estate group. It was also around this time that he persuaded