There’s a big to-do going on right now over the proposed sale of a chain of luxury hotels operated by the Japanese national post office, called Kampo no Yado. The post office here has always worked like a giant bank, offering services like savings accounts to Japanese consumers, just another example of Japan taking its cues from the U.K., where a similar system has been in place since 1861. Since Japanese people love to save money, there’s rather a lot of it in the postal savings system, a mind-boggling 106,000,000,000,000 yen or USD $1.15 trillion. (It took me several minutes to convert this number from the kanji-based numerical system used here to something I could wrap my head around.) Naturally, no politician could let that much money sit around and do nothing, so over the last two decades the government built a chain of luxury hotels for customers of the post office to use at a discount. Now that the post office has been privatized, they’re required to sell off the money-losing hotels, and a company called Orix has put in a bid to buy all 70 for the low, low price of just $109 million, despite the fact that it cost $2.6 billion to build the hotels in the first place. (And you thought your 401(k) had done poorly.) Japanese Internal Affairs Minister Hatoyama, known for being a can-do organizer, has blocked the sale so there can be an investigation of how the bid process was managed, and he plans to try to sell the hotels in smaller chunks so that the government can get a better price for them.
Does your post office let you stay for cheap in a traditional Japanese inn?
