East Japan Railway Company

The JR East Group will aim to function as a corporate group providing high quality and advanced services with railway businesses at its core while achieving sound management. For this purpose, every individual employee of the group will endeavor to support safe and punctual transportation and supply convenient and high-quality products. Every employee will take on the challenge of improving the standard of services and raising the level of technology in order to further gain the confidence and trust of customers. As a "trusted life-style service creating group," we will go forward with our customers to contribute to the achievement of a better living, the cultural development of local communities, and the protection of the global environment. Seventeen private railroad companies are nationalized as the Japan National Railway (JNR). JNR is privatized and divided into six regional passenger companies; East Japan Railway Company (JR East) is formed as a result. Shares of JR East are listed on the Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya stock exchanges. The Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation sells its remaining shares of JR East; the company becomes fully privatized. East Japan Railway Company (JR East) is the largest passenger railway company in the world. Approximately 16 million passengers travel on its 4,665-mile network each day. The company operates a five-route shinkansen, or bullet train, that travels between Tokyo and the eastern mainland of Japan. While transportation accounts for the majority of JR East's sales, the company is also involved in real estate, advertising, publicity, hotel operations, information services, housing development, construction, car rentals, and credit card services. JR East was once a government-owned entity; it became fully privatized in 2002. East Japan Railway Company was the largest of the six regional passenger companies into which Japan's state-owned railroad company, Japan National Railway, was divided in April 1987. Japan's railroad first began as a national railroad, since at the beginning of the Meiji Restoration no other organization could finance such a large project. The first railroad, opened in September 1872, ran from Shimbashi, west of Tokyo, to Yokohama in Kanagawa Prefecture, the main port near Tokyo. It was 23.8 kilometers long, with a gauge of 1,067 millimeters. To finance its construction, the Japanese government raised £1 million in London by issuing bonds through the Oriental Bank. One of these students was Masaru Inoue, who had studied civil engineering and mining at University College in London. He was invited to participate in the construction of the first Japanese railroad, and as head of the ministry of transport took the lead in railroad construction and in forming Japanese railroad policy. He was responsible for the government's decision to build all the railroads itself, but soon realized the difficulty of funding the project. Economic problems and a shortage of government funds meant that the construction of private railroads had to be permitted, though the government provided subsidies and other assistance. The first and largest private railroad was the Nippon Railroad, operating between Ueno, Tokyo, and Aomori, the largest city in the north of Japan's main island. The Nippon Railroad was financed mainly by the daimyo, or nobles, who had received compensation from the government for losing their former status at the time of the Meiji Restoration. The first stretch of the railroad opened in 1883, and its success induced the railroad boom from the end of the 1880s. As a result of the boom in railroad construction, the total length of the private railroad soon came to exceed that of the national railroad by a considerable margin: in 1905, the mileage of the private railroads attained 5,282 kilometers, compared with the national railroad's 2,414 kilometers. There was a lobby in the Japanese government for the nationalization of the private railroads. After the