Founding Meguro-Kamata: running railway and line-side land as one (1922)

Where the idea that a railway builds a town begins

What the founding of the Meguro-Kamata Electric Railway produced was not a single suburban tram line but a management type in which a railway and the land along it are run on one balance sheet. It did not count on fares alone to break even from the start; instead it opened housing estates along the line and turned the very movement of the people living there into revenue. This design, without precedent in Kanto, Managing Director Keita Goto set in motion on a specific piece of ground — Den-en-chofu. Here, one can say, lies the origin of the idea that a railway company does not merely lay track but builds a town and makes its residents into passengers.

That said, this type began to turn thanks to an unexpected tailwind — the migration to the suburbs that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake. The momentum of an age when population flowed outward and land prices climbed helped support, from the side of land and housing, a business that a railway alone could not have made pay. The integrated type Managing Director Keita Goto laid down at Den-en-chofu was carried on into the Tama Garden City housing development his successors ran, and reaches all the way to today’s Shibuya redevelopment. The question of how far a railway and real estate can go on being run on a single balance sheet still remains before this company, which chose from its founding to move track and land as one.