The post-oil-shock crisis and the end of the Kawasaki era (1979)

The question of whose management would rebuild it

The core of this decision can be seen as lying not merely in a response to an external shock, the oil crisis, but in Kawasaki Chiharu confronting his own twenty-one years of management. The move into side businesses had been chosen as a means of compensating for the structural disadvantage of running parallel to the national railway, and from the subway through-service and the founding of Oriental Land onward it had supported Keisei’s growth. That those same side businesses, because they had started late, took the heaviest blow from the oil crisis was an irony. In Kawasaki’s own remark that it was odd for a man to serve twenty years as president, one can see the candour of the manager.

Recovery from the crisis was not quick, however. Even after the airport line opened, trains did not reach the terminal building, and recurring losses continued until the year to March 1985. That a private railway which had made side businesses its weapon was badly damaged by those very businesses, and needed long years to rebuild, reflects a tension peculiar to private railway management: a structure that cannot stand on the core business alone, and the price of relying on what is beside it. Keisei’s competitiveness in airport access would be tested again only a decade or so later.