Diversifying into retail, leisure and Meiji Mura (1965)

What it means to manufacture your own demand

Filed under “private railway diversification,” Meitetsu in these years looks like one more operator stretching into property and leisure. But the core Tsuchikawa Motoo set was a single proposition: a railway must generate its own demand. Out of a conviction that modes of transport turn over within a century, he lined the network with attractions from other trades — a department store, a bus terminal, Meiji Mura — and made the very apparatus for drawing people onto the trains into a business. That he forced Meiji Mura through after it had been voted down as uneconomic shows how far he was willing to carry the idea.

And yet that same idea would later bind the company. Diversification rooted in the locality is hard to withdraw from, and the line runs straight through the post-bubble “agony of a great name” to the 2026 closure of the Meitetsu Department Store and the dissolution of its operating company. We can call Tsuchikawa’s diversification correct only because we know the decades in which its bulk carried the company. If the quality of management includes knowing when to recompose the pillars you have built, Meitetsu’s diversification became a long test of exactly that.