Seibu

"Yoshiaki’s companies owned one-sixth of all the land in Japan; and their land holdings increased every year. They owned the largest luxury hotel chain in the country with more than sixty hotels. You could live in a Seibu apartment, travel to work on Seibu Railways, stay at a Seibu-owned Prince hotel and go on holiday to one of Seibu’s resorts, which dominated all the country’s best ski slopes."

"Seibu came to epitomise all the changes that were taking place. Everyone knew Seibu. The name ‘Seibu’ meant not the empire of land, the ski resorts, the golf courses, the hotels or the railways, but a chain of department stores, dazzlingly innovative and avant-garde. As a new generation of Japanese emerged, ready to spend their money rather than save it, it was Seibu and the stores Seibu spawned that showed them how to spend it."