The last decades of Meiji saw the advent of the department store. In many of its details it represented the emergence of a Western institution and the retreat of the traditional to the lesser realm of the specialty store. Certainly there was imitation. The big Mitsukoshi store of the Taishō era, the one that burned so brightly after the earthquake, was an imitation of Wanamaker’s. If the department store symbolized the new city, however, it remained a Japanese sort of symbol. Department stores sold their wares by drawing crowds with culture and entertainment as well as merchandise. They were heirs to the shrine and temple markets, shopping centers ahead of their time.
Mitsukoshi’s famous glass display cases
Mitsukoshi and Shirokiya, at opposite approaches to the Nihombashi bridge, led the way into the great mercantile transformation. Edo methods predominated until about the turn of the century. They did not disappear even then, but the big dealers quickly moved on to mass sales of myriad commodities.
Mitsui, or Mitsukoshi, had entered Edo from the provinces in the seventeenth century. Shirokiya had opened for business in Nihombashi a few years earlier. Mitsukoshi has fared better than Shirokiya in the present century, but it would be facile to see in this the commonly averred victory of the provincial trader over the son of Edo. Both enterprises had been a part of Edo from its earliest years. Mitsukoshi was better at advertising and “image-making” than Shirokiya. Though purveying almost everything to almost everyone, it has preserved a certain air of doing so with elegance. In late Meiji, standing face to face across the bridge to which all roads led, the two sought to outdo each other with bold new innovations. Shortly after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 Mitsui added a second floor, with showcases. These were innovations so startling that they were for a time resisted. Edo had done its shopping on platforms perhaps two or three feet from the ground, with no wares on display.
Although Mitsukoshi was ahead in the matter of showcases and elevated shopping, Shirokiya was ahead in other respects. In 1886 it became the first of the old silk stores to sell Western clothes. It had one of the first telephones in the city, which, however, was kept out of sight, in a stairwell, lest it disturb people. It provided the country with its first shop girls. All the clerks in the old dry goods stores had been men. From about the time it became Mitsukoshi, which was registered as the legal name in 1904, Mitsui began selling hats, leather goods, and sundries. Then, having withdrawn to a back street because the main north-south street through Nihombashi was being widened, Mitsukoshi reopened on the old site in 1908, with the makings of a department store. Shirokiya replied with a new building, four storys and a tower, in 1911. It had game rooms and the first of the exhibition halls that give the modern Japanese department store certain aspects of a museum and amusement park. In 1914 Mitsukoshi completed a grand expansion, into the building that burned after the earthquake. The new Mitsukoshi was a five-story Renaissance building, not the highest in the city, but the largest, it was said, east of Suez, and very modern, with elevators, central heating, a roof garden, and even an escalator.
The Mitsukoshi of 1914 was not a very interesting building, at least from the outside, but the Shirokiya must have been a delight, built as it was in an eclectic style that looked ahead to the more fanciful effusions of Taishō. The building of late Meiji does not survive, but in photographs it seems the more advanced and certainly the more interesting of the two. Yet Shirokiya was less successful than its rival in keeping up with the times.
Shirokiya Department Store, Nihombashi, after 1911
Mainly, Mitsukoshi was the better at the big sell. Already at the turn of the century, a life-size picture of a pretty girl stood in Shimbashi Station inviting everyone to Mitsukoshi. Early in Taishō the store joined the Imperial Theater in a famous advertising campaign. The slogan was the only one still remembered from the early years of Japanese advertising. “Today the Imperial, tomorrow Mitsukoshi.” Inviting the public to spend alternate days at the two establishments, it was very successful. In the Taishō period Mitsukoshi had a boys’ band known to everyone. It is said to have been the first nonofficial band in the nation. The boys wore red and green kilts.
Despite all this innovation, the department stores were far from as big at the end of Meiji as they have become since. The old market was still healthy. Neighborhood stores offered most commodities and had most of the plebeian trade, the big Nihombashi stores still being a little too high-collar. Yet the department stores worked the beginnings of a huge cultural shift, so that the city of late Meiji seems far more familiar than the city of late Tokugawa. They were not the only enterprises of their kind in the city. Kanda and Ueno each had one, both of them to advance upon Ginza after the earthquake.
Matsuzakaya Department Store in Ueno
The problem of what to do with footwear was not solved until after the earthquake, and the delay was in some measure responsible for the slowness of the big stores to attract a mass clientele. Footwear was checked at the door in traditional fashion, sometimes tens of thousands of items per day, and replaced by specially furnished slippers. On the day of the dedication of the new Nihombashi bridge, still in use, Mitsukoshi misplaced five hundred pairs of footwear. For this reason among others the department store was a little like the Ginza bricktown: everyone wanted a look at it, but it would not do for everyday. It was on the standard tour for onobori, country people in for a look at the capital. The presence of Mitsukoshi, indeed, along with certain patriotic sites now out of fashion, is what chiefly distinguishes the Meiji Tokyo tour from that of today.
There was another kind of shopping center, also new in Meiji, and the vexing problem of footwear has been offered to explain its very great popularity from late Meiji into Taishō. The word hankōba is a Meiji neologism that seems on the surface to mean, with exhortatory intent, “place for the encouragement of industry.” It actually signifies something like “bazaar” or “emporium.” Numbers of small shops would gather under a roof or an arcade and call themselves a hankōba. In the years when the old dry goods stores were making themselves over into department stores, the bazaars were much more popular, possibly because the customer did not have to remove his shoes or clogs. The great day of the bazaar was late Meiji. When the department stores finally emerged as a playground for the whole family, on whatever level of society, bazaars went into a decline.
The first bazaar was publicly owned. It opened in 1878, selling products left over from the First Industrial Exposition, held at Ueno the preceding year. Its location was for the day a remote one, at the northern end of what would become the Mitsubishi Meadow, just east of the palace. Two bazaars dominated the busy south end of Ginza, near which the main railway station stood until early Taishō. The building of the present Tokyo Central Station displaced the crowds and sent the bazaars into a decline. In the fourth decade of Meiji, however, there were three bazaars in Kanda and seven in Ginza. By 1902 there were twenty-seven scattered over the city. Nine years later there were only eleven, and in 1913, the first full year of Taishō, only six.
No establishment has called itself a kankōba since the 1950s, but the kankōba must have been not unlike the shopping centers that are a threat to the Nihombashi stores today. For all the newness of the word, the kankōba also had much in common with the neighborhood shopping district of Edo. There is continuity in these things, and what seems newest may in fact