Forming “Dai-Tokyu” under wartime consolidation — and its postwar break-up (1942)

The map of Tokyo’s private railways, drawn by merger and split

The way Tokyu, Odakyu, Keikyu and Keio today divide the private-railway map of the capital region among themselves as separate companies can be seen as the product of this six-year consolidation and of the break-up that undid it. What gathered the four into one, and what split them apart again, was less any manager’s design than the outside forces of war and occupation. President Goto’s merger management prepared the ground for binding Kanto’s private railways together, but its end point, Dai-Tokyu, was not chosen as a peacetime business strategy — it was a provisional shape produced by wartime state policy.

What the break-up left to Tokyu was the south-west Tokyo lines it had worked before the expansion, and the Shibuya terminal. Ironically, it was this shrunken range that would later become the stage onto which Tokyu poured resources for the Tama Garden City development and the Shibuya redevelopment. More than the few years of gigantism, it was what it kept and restarted from that long shaped Tokyu’s later character. Between two external forces — consolidation and division — the fork in Tokyu’s postwar path lay in which assets it managed to take back into its own hands.