Entering city gas: Shin Nihon Gas and the regional utilities of Kanto (1966)

The lifespan of a design built on covering territory

This decision took a company that delivered gas in cylinders into a capital-intensive industry of an entirely different character. Gas carried in a cylinder is not bound to any service area, but customers can only be added one household at a time. Gas sent through pipes obliges you to accept the licence for an area and the weight of the plant, and in return lets you hold every home inside it at once. In Motoyama’s phrasing — the belt from thirty-five to fifty kilometres out — one can hear a geographical idea: to fill in the land beyond Tokyo Gas’s territory by using the two fuels for what each does best.

A design built on covering territory, however, works only while the territory is defended. When LP gas retailing moved to registration in 1997 and city gas was fully liberalised in 2017, the very lines that separated inside from outside began to fade. In April 2019 Shin Nihon Gas’s LP gas and new city-gas businesses were transferred to the parent, and in October 2020 Tosai Gas absorbed Shin Nihon Gas, retiring the name of the company born in 1966. A fifty-four-year design that filled the map of Kanto with subsidiaries was folded back into a single company for which the service area is no longer the unit.