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.

At the time of our inauguration

As of 2020

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).

The time at which the headquarters was established.

As of 2020

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.

Our hotel during construction

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 years old, my mother started this business when I was a second year high school student. About 40 years has passed since then and it is true that facilities are getting old.

We are planning to close this hotel on the 30th of April, 2026, which is the due date for repaying our little remaining debt. By then, we will have used this building for 40 years, mining 4 decades of industry experience and know-how from within its walls. At that time we plan to rebuild a brand new accommodation facility, leaning into the 40 years of experience to continue providing our service into the future.

Presently, Metropolitan Tokyo faces a complete excess of accommodation supply over demand as more hotels continue to open one after the other. We look to uniquely define our hotel compared to others to endure through the intense competition.

Having inherited this business, gotten married, and raised 3 children of my own, I’ve come to feel it has become increasingly difficult for the younger generation to raise children. For that reason we strive to stand out from other hotels, providing specialized family travel support.

Due to being a long-established hotel, we are free to offer very reasonable room prices.

Anyways, we created this website to inform customers and spare them feeling any regret.

Please consider staying with us if you are searching for a safe and convenient room, thinking “I want to save money for this Tokyo trip”!