One company per destination: the regional-subsidiary model (1972)

Dividing the company by where it sells

At the core of this decision was a way of choosing: not distributing a single brand nationwide, but dividing the company up on the side where the goods are sold. A provincial maker that had gone looking for customers outside its prefecture because the home market was too small lined up local corporations at each final point of contact — resort, station, airport — and put the speciality of that place on the sign. Judged on efficiency alone it is a duplicative way to spread out, but a posture that put owning the counter above everything else turned into a distinctive strength once tourism gave it a tailwind.

A structure that hugs the point of sale is, however, inseparable from a weakness: it does not turn unless people move. Every segment sank under COVID precisely because the counters were concentrated on travel routes, and every segment rose highest afterwards for the same reason. The dispersal that began in 1972 has survived half a century by changing places — to Hokkaido, then to the capital. How far a pattern born of a small home market can withstand the next change in the movement of people remains an open question.