The Marunouchi Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan: from red brick to a city of nine-storey blocks (1959)

What a city with its rooflines aligned left behind

A rule that set every roof at 31 metres was also a rule not to stack floors that could have been stacked. President Watanabe Takejiro gave the beauty of the plaza before the Imperial Palace as his reason, said he did not want a contest in height with no real benefit, and went as far as asking Tokio Marine, a fellow Mitsubishi company, to drop its own rebuilding. Because the largest landowner in Marunouchi drew a ceiling on itself, a district emerged in which the rooflines matched block by block. That the first-class tenants were rejecting the red brick and yet the case for rebuilding was not placed on the quantity of floor space says much about the character of the decision.

The restraint did not hold for long, however. The year after Nakata Otoichi declared the redevelopment complete, Nikkei Business put the unrealised gains in the Marunouchi district alone at some ¥400 billion and attacked what it called management on a land standard. Mitsubishi Estate itself was saying at the same time that meeting office demand in Marunouchi would require redeveloping the redevelopment, and that rebuilding would need swing space for tenants to move into. The nine-storey city, in other words, was an asset that had its own replacement priced in from the day it was finished.