Incorporating the family office as Mori Building, and concentrating on Toranomon (1959)

The scholar who brought the habit of calculation

Mori Taikichiro explained his refusal to step outside Toranomon by saying that scholars tend to caution and that he himself was cautious to the point of timidity. Investing on someone else’s ground frightened him; in Toranomon, which was like his own garden, he could work out in advance whether a project would pay. When in 1956 he made a broker swallow a price fifty per cent above the market, he derived the rise in land values from a premise — that Tokyo’s population would concentrate. What was brought into this business was not a property dealer’s feel for prices but a scholar’s habit of setting out premises and calculating forward.

That caution was not rewarded from the start, however. In the recession that began in 1964 the tenth and eleventh buildings could not be filled, and the company got through only by selling land it held in Aoyama to raise cash and by cutting rents. In meetings with the contractors he said things wide of the mark and was laughed at; he had to borrow lease agreements from Mitsubishi Estate and Mitsui Fudosan to make do. The habit of calculation began to pay only after he had survived this period as an amateur.