Absorbing Forward Building and becoming the home for Fuji Bank’s property (2000)

Assets chosen for the parent’s convenience became the capital for independence

There is little sign in this merger of a management vision that moved first. The circumstances of the parent bank — the three-way combination — came first, a need arose to gather former Fuji Bank property somewhere, and Nihonbashi Kogyo was largely used as the place to put it. For the company it can be seen as a passive decision. Even so, the experience of taking on buildings another company had held, corporate entity and all, was something the preceding forty years had never provided. A company that has once been through the work of taking custody of assets and tenants together approaches the next merger differently from one that has not.

What is interesting is the character of the assets that arrived. The land a bank had chosen in order to place branches was clustered near central-city stations. Property that had not been assembled by accumulating investment judgements of its own turned out, as a result, to have exactly the shape that suits a strategy of narrowing by location. That the Hulic of the mid-2000s onward could draw its growth around concentrated investment in Ginza and Kyobashi appears to owe to being able to start from the arrangement of these given assets. That a consolidation accepted passively became the capital for independence a decade later is where the character of this decision can be read.