Reviewing loss-making lines and pulling back to the home region (1999)

Slow because the roots ran deep

To describe Meitetsu’s restructuring simply as “late” is to simplify the conditions it faced. This was a company that had grown by binding small private railways together under wartime state policy and putting its roots into the region itself — resorts along the lines, subsidiaries everywhere. When the closure of Utsumi Forest Park was reversed at local request, and when negotiations to abandon lines stalled even though half of 502 kilometres was in the red, what showed was the paradox that profitability alone does not let you close a business. A vice-president telling elderly passengers on a line slated for closure that it pained him was the plain expression of that bind.

Still, accepting the bind undeniably slowed the work. Even after writing off ¥85.0 billion of losses in a single stroke, the president himself acknowledged that few businesses had actually been announced as exits, and the disposal of loss-making units retained the colour of postponement. The direction — pulling a nationwide web of businesses back to the Chūkyō region — never wavered, and it passed through the airport line into the post-Covid holding structure. For a company rooted in its region, drawing the line between what to fold and what to keep is itself the test of management. Meitetsu’s agony demonstrated, over a long span of years, just how hard that line is to draw.