Taking over Tokyo’s municipal gas bureau (1885)

A cheap purchase, traded for four years of work

The man who stopped the sell-off resolved by the Tokyo prefectural assembly in 1881 was Shibusawa Eiichi himself — the very person who stood to receive it. Rather than use the chance to buy cheaply there and then, he spent four years opening up indoor demand, enlarging the plant and sending engineers to Shanghai, and took the business on for ¥270,000 only after it was in the black. Reverse the order and the transaction would have moved value built with taxpayers’ money from the city’s residents into private hands. It is a case in which the terms on which a private company takes over a public utility were prepared, in advance, by the person taking it over.

That it passed into private hands did not, however, open any distance from government. In 1929, when the City of Tokyo refused a capital increase and demanded a cut in gas rates, an 89-year-old Shibusawa had to appear before the Minister of Commerce and Industry to mediate. Rates and investment alike remained inseparable from public judgement. Given that city gas went on facing the line between regulation and liberalization for another century, one can read 1885 as having settled only the form of ownership.