Greetings

Within the Tokyo Metropolitan area customers are presented with a range of lodging choices, from comic cafes to foreign-affiliated luxury hotels costing hundreds-of-thousands of yen per night. Many people get hotel information on the internet with ease, but end up having a bad experience, leaving them feeling disappointed. We created this website to inform customers and spare them feeling any regret.

It is common to find hotel information sources sharing photographs of rooms that cause them to appear more spacious than in reality. We are proud to say we do not take such actions on our website.

This website communicates only accurate details about our hotel. We take pride of our hotel, and do not hide details about it or misrepresent it in any of our words or photographs.

We expect that you may ask yourself “What on earth is City Pension?” and that you may consider it a gamble to stay at an in-house managed hotel which is different from a chain hotel.

We would be most happy if by reading this website you can change your anxiety for peace of mind before your stay with us at CITY PENSION Zem.

Sequence of events

In the early 1980s, there were few hotels in this area, which lies only 200m from Tokyo City Air Terminal. Seeing the potential of the site, my predecessor, my mother, took the initiative establishing the business. She began planning from when I was a junior high school student, and she opened the hotel in February of my second year in high school. Initially she planned to renovate her own building which housed RESTAURANT RAGOUT, however, we ended up building the 10-story building instead.

History

Showa 10 (1935)
Grandfather; Tadao Shinohara launches a private business selling paints and industrial chemicals in Shibuya-ward, Tokyo.

Showa 25 (1950)
Shinoda Industry, an unlimited partnership company, is founded with my mother Shizue Wada as a representative partner. Manufacturing and paint of sale were established in Itabashi ward, while the headquarters was located here in Nihonbashi.

Showa 37 (1962)
The headquarters building was newly built in Nihonbashi, Chuo ward, Tokyo (the building is four-story ferroconcrete and houses RESTAURANT RAGOUT on the first floor).

Showa 58 (1983)
The vacant land that used to be our headquarters’ parking lot was transformed into the 10-story hotel building. We also renovated our adjacent headquarters building and started running our business “CITY PENSIN Zem” between the two buildings.

To the present

“Zem” was born of a desire to efficiently make use of idle land we were fortunate enough to possess to realize a dream.

We are not only saying “Peace of mind, security, and cleanliness”, but we do really pursue the level of traditional Tokyo hospitality (frank, cheerful, and considerate) I used to experience when I was a little, even though many people may feel that Tokyo has lost much of that now. We truly hope you can feel relaxed, comfortable, and leisurely in our CITY PENSION…Let’s call it our “Urban Western-style Inn”.

We’ve always deeply valued running and managing our hotel to our own ideals, and at a scale that allows us to say ‘no’ when we feel it necessary. We’ve kept our hotel family owned and run, with only some trusted part-time staff to help with day-to-day operations. We take pride providing our cash-flow backed service, paying our property taxes, and humbly contributing our part to society and the world.

In 1983, when I was 17 and in my second year of high school, my parents started this business. Now, nearly 40 years later, we plan to close on April 30, 2026, coinciding with the repayment of the remaining loans. My goal was to fully utilize this old building until then, packing it with 40 years of lodging expertise, and rebuild it into a new lodging facility suited to the times.” That’s what I wrote on the previous version of the website. However, the deterioration of the facilities progressed far beyond expectations, leading to the judgment that continuing operations was impossible. Unable to reach that point, we closed the doors once on February 28, 2025. Considering the current situation—a shortage of hotels due to inbound demand, the existence of an older building, and the fact that we can still work fully for another 10 years until age 70—we made a comprehensive decision. Instead of rebuilding, we will carry out major renovations and plan to continue the lodging business for another 10 years.

The concept for this renovation emerged from my daily front desk duties interacting with guests, amid the surge in inbound demand following the pandemic and ongoing labor shortages. We transformed the property from 27 rooms (3 or 4 per floor) into just 9 rooms (one per floor), creating spacious accommodations for larger groups. Each room now features laundry facilities and a compact kitchen, enabling us to better meet our guests’ needs.

Our policy since opening has been to keep costs low and operate as economically as possible. We’ve further streamlined our operations: stays are room-only with a minimum 3-night minimum, payment is by card in advance only, cleaning is every 3 days, and amenities like toothbrushes are generally not provided. Through years of operation, we understand the rental items our guests request. Previously, space constraints prevented us from keeping them stocked in rooms. This time, however, we have secured ample storage space. Our goal is to provide these items not as rentals, but as services available from the start.