Moving the head office to Awaji Island (2020)

Where should a head office be?

The heart of this decision lies not in a retreat or a contraction forced by financial crisis but in a change of location springing from the founder’s conviction. Reading Tokyo’s over-concentration as a vulnerability to disaster, Yasuyuki Nambu had nursed the idea alone ever since the 2011 earthquake, built up the tourism and agriculture ventures and the means to receive the move first, and then waited for the tailwind of the pandemic before shifting the head-office functions. Stepping one pace outside the industry mainstream that competes on the scale and efficiency of human services, and staking a head office of some 1,200 people on the wager that the places where employment is created lie in the regions — that is what gives this relocation a character all its own.

That said, the question this contrarian design threw open is not yet closed. Measured by the number of employees who actually relocated, the move met its stated target on schedule. But whether tourism and agriculture can be raised into new pillars of revenue, and how a head office removed from the metropolitan centre lifts corporate value, remain as homework — set alongside the rebuilding of the core business after the Benefit One sale. Must a large company’s head office stand in the heart of the city? The move to Awaji Island is an experiment, still under way, that seeks to answer that question in practice.