Ichizō Kobayashi

Photograph of Ichizō Kobayashi (courtesy of Mukōyama Tateo).

Ichizō Kobayashi (小林 一三, Kobayashi Ichizō, January 3, 1873; Nirasaki, Yamanashi – January 25, 1957; Ikeda, Osaka), is Japanese industrialist. He is best known as the founder of Hankyu Railway, the Takarazuka Revue, and Toho. He represented Japanese capital in government.

Drawn to the Stage

Kobayashi took inspiration from the youth ensemble that the Mitsukoshi Department Store had used to attract customers in Tokyo. This group of 20 to 30 fresh-faced teenage boy musicians, wearing Western-style clothes and feathered hats worn at an angle, were highly successful in publicizing the store. “For our Takarazuka New Spa,” Kobayashi later wrote in Takarazuka oitachi no ki (The History of Takarazuka), “we imitated this group, and with guidance from Mitsukoshi set up a girls’ musical theater group.”

Kobayashi devoted so much energy to his Takarazuka project out of a love of drama that dated back to his childhood. He was born within sight of Mount Fuji in the city of Nirasaki in Yamanashi Prefecture. According to Mukōyama Tateo, a visiting professor at the University of Yamanashi who lives in the city and has researched the life of Kobayashi, he came from a wealthy merchant family and at a young age frequently attended plays put on by a small theater near his elementary school. Even after entering Keiō University, he continued to regularly attend theater and kabuki performances. He also enjoyed writing and had a novel serialized in the local Yamanashi newspaper.

After graduating from university, Kobayashi joined Mitsui Bank and worked there for 15 years. In part because the staid life of a bank employee did not suit him, while working in Osaka he was attracted to the literary and theatrical world. He spent more and more time in the entertainment district and got to know the men about town who were regulars there. The experience and connections that Kobayashi built up during this time would serve him well when he launched his theater group.

A Unique Atmosphere

Only unmarried women can perform on the Takarazuka stage. Kobayashi wanted to present his audiences with a dream world far removed from everyday life, and this rule remains even today. Performers also had to undergo two years of hard training at Takarazuka Music School, based on its motto, “Purity, Honesty, Beauty.” This is the fundamental difference between Takarazuka Revue shows and western operas and musicals, which hold auditions for each new production.

In his history of Takarazuka, Kobayashi used a curiously domestic metaphor in describing his dream: “It would be impossible to train men in that way for our productions. In cooking too, perhaps only men can produce something truly excellent, but it is women who rustle up something quick for the family. There are currently between 400 and 500 Takarazuka students and we could not have so many if we included men. There would be non-stop fighting and arguments. There is no room for men in Takarazuka, and it has an atmosphere that could not be created without limiting it to women only.”

Kobayashi’s Many Pies

Aside from theatrical activities, Kobayashi oversaw a number of creative entrepreneurial projects centered on the railway business that targeted ordinary consumers. He expanded the focus of his business from simply taking passengers from one point to another to include development of housing along the railway route and introduced Japan’s first mortgage system. He also opened the Hankyū Department Store at the railway’s Umeda terminal building in Osaka, with an affordable café on the top floor selling popular dishes like curry rice.

In 1938, when he was also CEO of Tokyo Electric (now TEPCO), Kobayashi set up Japan’s first business hotel, Daiichi Hotel in Shinbashi, Tokyo, to accommodate businessmen on trips to the capital. And he was involved in the management of Tōkyū’s railway business in its early days as well as the development of the exclusive Den’enchōfu residential district.

As a corporate executive, Kobayashi preferred to take on a wide-ranging role akin to a theater producer, rather than simply issuing orders. And he occasionally demonstrated the literary skills sharpened by fiction writing, as when he wrote, printed, and distributed 10,000 pamphlets to promote the Minō Arima Electric Railway at the moment its launch was running into trouble, dubbing it the “most promising of rail companies.” He was also known to write pamphlets to publicize the sale of land and new houses.

Kobayashi’s acumen for public relations anticipated the sort of commercial messages we see today. His masterpiece in this vein came when he opened a line to Kobe in 1920 and produced a newspaper advertisement sniping at the crowded trains of his Hanshin rivals. “Our new express trains between Kobe and Osaka are clean, fast, and nearly empty, with great views and cool carriages.” It should not be surprising that he also wrote more than 20 theatrical pieces for the Takarazuka Revue.

Kobayashi later dabbled in politics. In 1940, he became the first private citizen appointed as minister of commerce and industry when he joined the cabinet of Konoe Fumimaro. However, disagreements with future Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke led to his resignation after less than a year. Following the end of World War II, in 1945 he was appointed minister of state and president of the War Damage Rehabilitation Board, but he was quickly purged from this position.

Although Kobayashi’s business interests covered a broad spectrum, he was “most interested in business activities related to people’s everyday lives,” according to Mukōyama Tateo. “If there was no firm connection between his work and people’s lives he felt it had no meaning for him.”

What he loved to work on most of all was Takarazuka, a kind of theater that ordinary people could easily attend. There were expensive seats, but there were plenty of cheap seats, too—“like outfield seats in baseball or third-tier seats in sumō,” Mukōyama notes. “People could go all year round. You don’t have to be close to the action to simply enjoy a little culture. Isn’t that what finding culture in our daily lives is all about?”