JR East, a major railroad company operating that serves the Kanto and Tohoku regions of Japan, recently hosted a multi-day fundraiser as part of the nationwide project to rebuild Tohoku after March’s earthquake. While I was volunteering at this benefit, what struck me over and over again was how little JR needed to spend to offer the accommodations given.

I live a fair distance from Tokyo, a one-way trip to Tokyo takes about me about three hours, and costs around 1500 yen (about $20 USD), if I use local train routes (which saves money, but takes more time.) Were I to go back and forth to Tokyo every day, it would take six hours of my time, and cost 3000 yen ($40 USD) a day. A hotel would eliminate this problem, but Tokyo is one of the worlds most expensive cities. Volunteering away from home normally comes at some cost, to either myself, or to the cause that I’m supposed to be helping.

Rail and hospitality are both industries are both industries with low variable costs, though. While building, maintaining, and operating trains, train stations, and hotels is expensive, allowing an additional person to use those services is not. As long as a train or hotel is not fully booked, and a paying customer is not turned away in favor of a volunteer, there is virtually no loss to the company offering the services. JR East, like many Japanese companies, uses vertical integration and owns a hotel. A free express train ticket and hotel room allowed me to put in more work, while costing JR East only a fraction of a yen in additional power needed for the train, the price of printing each ticket, and just a handful more for hotel amenities and detergent for clean sheets. The venue itself was in a corridor of a train station, costing them very little.

JR benefits too, of course. While I am not sure if a buzzterm like “corporate consciousness” exists as prominently in Japanese as it does in English, events like these are an opportunity to improve corporate image. With more immediate financial benefit, JR promoted tourism to Tohoku, which would benefit Tohoku while allowing for more train tickets to be sold.