Head Office, Tokyo Gas Co., Kanda, Tokyo, c. 1910.

Head Office, Tokyo Gas Co. Ltd., Kanda, Tokyo, c. 1910, founded in 1885 after the Tokyo Prefecture Gas Bureau was purchased by venture capitalists Shibusawa Eiichi and Asano Sōichirō. Headquarters for the new company were established in Kanda Ward in 1898. That building, portrayed here, was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. The company briefly relocated to Hongo Ward before reestablishing its head office in the Tokio Kaijo Hoken (Marine Insurance) Building in Marunouchi business district.

Japan’s first gas enterprise was founded in Yokohama in 1872, producing street lighting from manufactured coal gas. The Basamichi district was the first city district in Japan to be artificially lit at night.

The Tokyo Prefectural Gas Bureau would be established in 1874, and the rebuilt Ginza shopping boulevard would be lit by 85 gas lamps by the end of the year fueled with coal gas manufactured at a factory in nearby Shiba Ward. By the end of the decade, there were more than 356 gas lamps illuminating nighttime Tokyo.

Capitalists Shibusawa Eiichi and Asano Sōichirō acquired the Bureau’s assets in 1885 and recapitalized their new venture into Tokyo Kawaraisha KK (Tokyo Gas Company).

In the 1910s, sources of water-soluble natural gas were discovered in shallow methane-rich Chiba Prefecture gas fields. Within 20 years, Tokyo Gas Co. had shifted almost entirely away from manufactured gas distribution to choosing instead to extract natural gas from the Chiba aquifers via a distillation and dehydration process, then transporting the natural gas through a network of pipes from Chiba into the Tokyo Gas Company’s city-wide gas distribution grid.

The Chiba fields continued to be used into the 1970s until imported LNG surpassed domestic production.