Company history

Takarazuka Enterprise was founded in central Nagoya in April 1973 by Ito Yoro, who had come out of the real-estate business and knew exactly what a resort costs before it earns anything: the land, then the building, then years of waiting. In December 1974 the company opened Sun Members Hirugano in the mountains of Gifu — a hotel whose rooms were not rented but owned, sold in advance as membership rights.

That was the whole invention. An ordinary hotel rides the swings of tourist demand; a membership hotel recovers its capital before the doors open and then runs on a fixed base of members who have already paid. The financing structure, not the hospitality, was the product. A national real-estate licence followed in 1981, and by 1982 the operating side had been spun into a subsidiary and a second head office opened in Tokyo.

In April 1986 the company took the name it still carries — Resorttrust — dropping the property-company past for the business it had actually become. A year later it moved upmarket: XIV (Excellence) Toba opened in 1987 as a higher-grade membership hotel above the Sun Members line, and Izu, Shirahama and Karuizawa followed in quick succession. Selling a more expensive right to the same customer would become the company’s standing method of growth.

The decisive insight of the 1990s was that pre-paid membership had nothing to do with resorts. If members would fund a hotel before it existed, they would fund anything they intended to use for decades. In September 1992 Resorttrust set up HIMEDIC to sell memberships in a medical club, and in 1994 opened HIMEDIC Yamanakako — PET-based early cancer screening delivered with the service standards of a resort hotel. It was the company’s second business, built entirely out of the first one’s financial machinery.

Capital followed. The shares were registered over-the-counter in 1997 and listed on the first sections of the Tokyo and Nagoya exchanges in November 2000, funding resort, golf and medical expansion at once. The medical arm then acquired the credibility that a resort operator could not manufacture on its own: a screening programme with the University of Tokyo Hospital in 2006, a joint venture with Mitsui Fudosan in 2005, and in March 2007 the Tokyo Midtown Medical Center, run in partnership with Johns Hopkins Medicine International.

The membership form kept finding new assets. Bay Court Club, opened in Tokyo’s Ariake in 2008, moved the strictly members-only hotel into the city rather than the countryside. In June 2010 the purchase of Trust Garden, an operator of premium nursing homes, opened a third business in senior living — housing, care and medicine sold together to wealthy older members. And in October 2014 Resorttrust bought The Kahala Hotel & Resort in Honolulu, its first overseas move and its largest acquisition.

Governance was reorganized first. The move to a company with an audit and supervisory committee in 2015 prepared the three-headed structure that took shape in June 2017, when Ito Katsuyasu became chairman and CEO and Fushimi Yuki, a professional manager rather than a member of the founding family, became president and COO under founder Ito Yoro. The five-year plan launched in 2018, Connect 50, pointed the group at its half-century.

The pandemic then proved the model rather than breaking it. Because members had already paid, the shock landed far more lightly than on ordinary hotels, and Resorttrust opened the Yokohama Bay Court Club and The Kahala Yokohama in September 2020 — new capacity in the worst year the industry had seen. In March 2022 it went the other way on the business it did not control: the six Hotel Trusty properties open to the general public were sold, booking a gain of ¥8.0bn, while three locations that members actually used were kept. A digital-health joint venture with DeNA was set up the same month, and in July HIMEDIC and Trust Garden were merged into one medical and care operation.

The group turned fifty in April 2023 and replaced Connect 50 with Sustainable Connect — To Wellbeing, a plan that binds resorts, medicine and senior living together under one customer promise: health and time in a hundred-year life. The Sanctuary Court brand pushed membership pricing higher still from 2024, and a second edition of the plan started in May 2025. The unresolved question is succession — the founding family and a bench of internal professionals both remain in the frame, and a business built on selling lifetime relationships has yet to settle its own.