EAST JAPAN RAILWAY
East Japan Railway (JRE) operates 4,634.3 miles (7,458.2km) of railway in the eastern part of Honshu, and is used by 6.218 billion passengers a year. This private railway company has taken property development far beyond any equivalent in Europe, behaving more like a pre-nationalisation British railway company when they owned hotels, restaurants, housing, shops and warehouses.
JRE has adopted a policy of commercial development that generates both revenue and passengers, by providing a wide range of retail, residential, health, lifestyle and cultural amenities around a transport hub. It regards its stations as the group’s biggest business resource, with the goal of maximising the synergies between railway operations and non-transport businesses.
Passenger numbers are one of the factors to determine levels of investment. Stations with a footfall of between 30,000 and 200,000 people a day have had their operational requirements partially reviewed, to determine if space could be released for commercial activities requiring minimal investment and short construction schedules.
Stations with over 200,000 passengers have had a full-scale review of the layout and existing facilities in order to create better or additional space, including construction of artificial ground for air-space development.
There is a wide variety of ownership arrangements, from 100% to shared ownership, including a percentage of a building or by floors - as is the case at JR Tokyu Meguro Building. Some of its residential developments are on a huge scale. A condominium tower beside Saitama-Shintoshin station (18 miles from Tokyo) has 31 storeys and 260 units with offices and restaurants in the lower storeys (see picture, page 38). Office buildings provide a steady, long-term income and JRE currently operates 280,000 square metres of leasable office space.
In the early 2000s it developed two brands of hotel - full-service Metropolitan Hotels (of which the flagship is the 815-room example in Tokyo), and Hotel Mets (smaller-scale urban hotels to the same standard but with fewer facilities). JRE broke new technical ground in 2004 with the opening of Hotel Dream Gate Maihama, offering 80 rooms aimed at families and tourist groups. Its construction underneath an elevated railway line was made possible by new construction techniques that not only overcame the obvious drawbacks of noise and vibration, but also incorporated a seismic isolation system.
JRE has other brands which were created in the last half of the 1990s - Familio (themed around sports and outside activities), and Folkloro (which seeks to emulate a French-style auberge, using produce from an adjacent vegetable garden). JRE currently has 45 hotels with 6,690 rooms.
JRE has also developed Dila, atré, ecute and S-PAL as brands for its shopping centres, each matched to the characteristics of its location. In 2002 JRE was operating 110 shopping centres, with tenants carefully chosen to provide a broad mix and reflect local demographics and needs (for example, childcare facilities at stations enhance the convenience of commuting by train). Today it operates 154 shopping centres, with more than two million square metres of floor space.
