Multi-story parking garages, commonly seen in buildings and shopping malls, are a familiar sight throughout Japan.

They’re everywhere, and many people have likely used them multiple times.

The first multi-story parking garage in Japan was the “Marunouchi Garage,” built in 1929 (Showa 4) in Marunouchi, Tokyo.

The first president of Marunouchi Garage, who planned and developed this multi-story parking garage—a concept not yet present in Japan—was Shunichiro Mizushima.

He had been running a Renault car dealership since the Meiji era.

He planned the garage and received funding from Mitsubishi Goshi Kaisha Real Estate Division (now Mitsubishi Estate Co., Ltd.) to open it.

Incidentally, parking fees at the time were 35 yen per month, 25 yen for nighttime parking only, 20 yen for daytime parking only, and 1 yen 50 sen per day for temporary parking.

30,000 yen was roughly equivalent to the starting salary of a university graduate at the time, so in today’s currency, it would be equivalent to over 200,000 yen.

It was an extremely expensive parking facility.

In addition to these high parking fees, there were only about 1,500 cars in Tokyo at the time, and only about 500 of those were used for commuting to and from Marunouchi.

Street parking was commonplace, so the business seemed to have faced considerable difficulties.

However, the building’s sturdiness, which allowed it to survive the Tokyo air raids, became well-known, and after the war, applications flooded in.