Founding: from a Marunouchi auction with no bidders to Japan’s largest property company (1890)

What the purchase of “useless land” left behind

What this founding shows is a choice made on a long clock: buy an open field with no visible use, in one lot, and build a Western-style office street on it. The purchase drew criticism inside the house at the time, and the local press doubted the district would ever prosper. From Mitsubishi Ichigokan in 1894 to the completed Icchō London of 1918 and on to the Marunouchi Building of 1923, the record is of leasable buildings added one at a time — and it appears to have been that accumulation which turned land nobody would price into the central business district of Tokyo.

The other thing that comes into view is what it means to manage a single asset, Marunouchi, as a whole. The separation of 1937 reads as a judgement that the property business had outgrown a division of the zaibatsu and belonged in a company of its own. The re-merger only three years after the post-war three-way split confirmed in practice that holding Marunouchi in pieces was not a workable business. A little over sixty years after the purchase, Mitsubishi Estate had settled into corporate form as a listed company operating a portfolio concentrated in one place.