Today is March 1^st, the first day of work at our new office. Located near Tokyo Metro’s Zoshigaya Station, it’s on the top floor of a seven-story building to the northwest of Chitosebashi Bridge over the Meiji-Dori highway, one of the prominent bridges designated by the Tokyo metropolitan government. This building takes on a somewhat unusual appearance. It features arc-shaped large glass windows facing north and looks like a slice of pizza when seen from above on a Google Map. On my first visit here for a viewing, I was totally fascinated by the view from this 25-meter-wide unique-shape glass window.

Have you ever had a moment when you felt something came like a bolt from the blue? What led us to start a new office life from March 2022 was an incident that struck me out of the blue. Without it, I wouldn’t have experienced a moment of something coming out of the blue, nor couldn’t we have had a chance for moving to a new office. I would like to go back in time to explain some details leading up to our office relocation.

In May 2017, GK Design Group set up a committee for facility management. In its first meeting, which I took part in, the committee members discussed office relocations of Tokyo-based six group companies that should be completed within three years. Following the discussion, the six companies started exploring the possibility of moving to a new office. To make a long history short, what existed as a background of the discussion was, as I remembered it, a rather sentimental message that the six Tokyo-based companies should work together under the same roof as they used to do some decades ago. They became independent in the late 1980’s and since then, have been operating at separate locations in Tokyo’s Takadanobaba area. This message seemed to suggest that concentration of the six companies in one place helps to create synergies, but I think it also implied GK Group should become more cohesive as two years had passed since Kenji Ekuan, the group’s founder, passed away in 2015.

Initially, GK Design Group sought a dream-like plan that the six Tokyo-based companies would move to a warehouse building in a waterfront area like Makuhari or Kiba, on the assumption that it would be renovated on our own initiative. But soon after starting to discuss the plan, they found it hard to reach agreement. In winter 2017, they decided to make the plan more compact, allowing companies with similar business operations to relocate to new places on condition that such moves would create synergy effects. They ended up taking a more realistic stance. As a result, in October 2018, two of the six companies, GK Industrial Design and GK Sekkei, moved to new offices in the same building. Around that time, I visited some properties for viewing but none of them hit me in my mind, presumably to the disappointment of Mr. F, a real-estate agent who had been working hard to support our relocation plan. In addition, I was concerned about budget expectations for moving to a new office. As of February 2022, GK Dynamics had 48 employees. It was relatively a large organization in the field of design. As I planned to hire new employees every year and felt our office needed more space, I had an intention to move to a place that could provide a larger space for our workforce. But since office rents in Tokyo kept rising back then, we had no choice but to pay much more in rent if we dared to move to a new place. Furthermore, we had to prepare a fair amount of money for various expenses such as interior decoration, furnishings, moving expenses, disposal of leftover items, and restoration of the office. At the end of 2019, I decided to shelve the relocation plan. I honestly wanted to avoid our company management coming under strain. And after the turn of the year, an unknown infectious disease emerged in Wuhan in China and started to take hold in countries around the world. Accordingly, the Japanese government declared the first state of emergency on April 7.

(The story continues to Part II)

President

Yoshiharu Sugawara