The Untold Story of the 'Money Guy'

Gambling Man is a biography of one of the world's most consequential investors—Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank. It takes a reader through his journey from his birthplace in a Korean slum in post-war Japan to the modern-day temples of power

- LIONEL BARBER

The first wave of Korean migrants to Japan arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. They came in search of economic opportunity. The Japanese economy was industrializing fast, education was improving, and jobs were aplenty. Compared to a life in poverty on the Korean peninsula, Imperial Japan offered attractive prospects. Among the thousands who took the 11-hour journey across the Tsushima Strait, where a Japanese fleet of steel battleships annihilated the Russian navy in 1905, was a chippy teenager by the name of Son Jong-gyeong.

Masayoshi Son's grandfather arrived in 1917 in Kyushu, the western island in the Japanese archipelago which juts towards the Korean mainland as Cuba almost touches the southernmost tip of Florida. Imperial Japan was the dominant power in the region, having triumphed in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-5 and the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-5 and having annexed Korea in 1910, reducing its neighbour to the status of a colony. Born in 1899, the teenager lost his father when he was only four years old. Soon afterwards, the Japanese military seized the family farm and turned it into an airstrip.