Making ekinaka and lifestyle services a pillar of non-transport revenue (1990)

How the hidden assets were turned into earnings

At the heart of this decision is that JR East took the asset a railway holds most of — the station itself, where people gather — and turned it into revenue distinct from the fare. At its founding the company tried to convert stations into an earnings engine with a single flashy stroke, a directly run department store, and got nowhere. What worked instead was a chain of vessel-building and patient accumulation: setting up Tokyo-area Station Building Development, turning major stations into shops. Not one grand design but many small trades stacked station by station across a whole network was, in the end, what grew a pillar of non-transport earnings.

That pillar, though, rested on a location no rival could hold: the metropolitan area. Stations through which several million people pass each day are themselves the finest retail sites, and ekinaka became a strategy the other JR companies could not reproduce at the same scale. The flip side is that a revenue structure supported by station footfall carries the fragility of wobbling the moment people stop moving — a weakness that surfaced in the later pandemic, when commuter demand thinned. How far the station, as a hidden asset, can be raised into earnings genuinely independent of the railway is a question that still runs on today, through the “Suica economic zone” and the “two-axis” management the company now proclaims.