About the studio
JR East Marketing & Communications, known by the initialism JEKI, was founded in May 1988 as a subsidiary of East Japan Railway Company, based in Shibuya, Tokyo. It's an advertising agency, and its most distinctive anime connection is handling marketing tie-ins for franchises with railway themes, most notably Shinkalion, an anime built directly around JR East's own Shinkansen bullet trains. *A railway company's marketing arm co-branding an anime around its own trains is about as direct a synergy as this industry gets.* It's also worked on Pokémon-related station promotions and campaigns. Worth noting: there's no dedicated Wikipedia article for this company, so its founding date is sourced from business directories rather than an independently verified encyclopedia entry. Nearly 40 years in, JEKI represents one of the more literal examples of a company using anime specifically to promote its own core, non-entertainment business.