Founding McDonald’s Japan on 50/50 equity, and opening the Ginza flagship (1971)

Efficiency and local instinct — two kinds of precision

The heart of this founding decision is that a market only just opened to foreign capital was entered by an importer of sundry goods with no restaurant experience, armed with extraordinary joint-venture terms and a precision about location. The 1% royalty was not only a product of Fujita’s bargaining but of the indifference of Japan’s big food makers, who had misjudged the hamburger’s future. That the first to raise a hand secures the better terms owes less to that party’s ability than to the market’s still being empty. Fujita filled that emptiness with the discipline of company-owned operation and with sites chosen to the metre.

Yet this strength was bound up tightly with the gifts of a single merchant. The managerial freedom that the 1% royalty and the direct-operation model rested on belonged to Fujita personally, and as he stepped down in the 2000s and control passed to the U.S. parent, that latitude thinned. Even so, Fujita’s idea — of remaking a trade run on experience and intuition into a science of a few carefully chosen items — opened in Japan the path of designing food service like an industry. As the tale of a young Masayoshi Son visiting Fujita to learn his methods suggests, this landing that began in Ginza leaves a question larger than one company’s founding: how to reconcile standardized efficiency with the instinct to read the particular flow of people through a place. The decision to choose that single spot in Ginza Mitsukoshi still puts that question to restaurant location strategy today.