Department Stores—East Asia

About 5 pages (1,452 words)

Department Stores—East Asia

In East Asia, department stores are more than just glittering showplaces for merchandise. They have reflected and helped propel urban development, the growing middle classes, and the transition to consumer lifestyles. Pivotal in the transition to a Westernized and internationalized lifestyle, East Asian department stores have introduced foreign goods, customs, and holidays. Conversely, they have also helped preserve traditional customs and activities. They have mediated historic transitions, addressing issues these changes have brought for consumers. Further, they have provided education and entertainment and have been primary promoters of art and culture.

Japan

Japan's department stores boast a four-hundred-year history. These stores stem from two traditions. The older historic tradition is the development of department stores from gofukuya, clothing and drapery stores, which originated as large merchant houses during the Edo or Tokugawa period (1600/1603–1868). These accompanied the rise of Japan's early cities and the new middle classes that emerged from the formerly lowly ranks of artisans and merchants. Early in the twentieth century, some decades after Japan opened to the outside world, these stores expanded into hyakkaten, "one-hundred-things stores," or department stores. The second tradition for the development of department stores in Japan is with railroad companies, which built department stores at stations at urban intersections and in outlying suburban areas as railroads became prominent in commuting withincities and in connecting cities to the outlying areas where many urban employees lived. These stores were called tetsudo depaato ("railroad department stores"). Over time both types of department stores came to be referred to as either hyakkaten or depaato. Depaato is more common in colloquial speech, while hyakkaten is used more in official store titles.

Ornate light fixtures in Lotte department store in Seoul, South Korea, in 1998. (CATHERINEKARNOW/CORBIS)

Japanese department stores played a major role in introducing the West to Japan. One of the earliest department stores, Mitsukoshi, established ties to British stores and British royalty while also promoting American connections. Department stores brought in Western goods and taught people how to use them. Specialized employees taught the Japanese how to put on Western-style clothing with buttons, which were very unfamiliar to a populace who daily wore kimonos wrapped or tied into place. Department stores also promoted foreign holidays, such as Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. After a fire at the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo, several shoes went missing in the rush to exit the store, and the store began requiring its employees and customers to wear shoes in the store, ending the previous Japanese business custom of removing outside footwear and wearing slippers in shops. Several kimono-clad women died in another fire at the Shirokiya department store because they would neither jump nor slide down chutes for fear their clothing might become disarrayed and embarrassingly revealing. The store joined the Tokyo municipal fire department in promoting the adoption of Western-style underpants so both lives and honor could be saved in a fire.

Japanese department stores proffered entertainment with concerts, craft fairs, and recreational facilities inside stores and on rooftops. They offered education in the form of seminars, health and medical guidance for new parents, and in-store science fairs and educational contests for children. Typically, such seminars and other free information services did not involve the expectation that customers would buy anything on that occasion, but were geared toward developing loyal patronage through an ongoing relationship with the store. Stores also sent educational specialists into schools. Tokyo's Seibu department store started a "community college" (requiring course fees) with over four hundred course offerings, a major innovation in personal-interest education in Japan. Most department stores have exhibit and gallery spaces for art and folk craft displays. Isetan and Seibu department stores inaugurated legally designated museums of art within their stores. These museums, galleries, and exhibit halls have been pivotal in circulating Japanese and foreign art. In the last few decades of the twentieth century in Japan more international art circulated through department store museums than through government and private museums. These stores also responded to Japanese nostalgia for lost Japan by sponsoring Japanese traditional crafts and hosting calendrical festivals associated with a rural agrarian past.

South Korea

Department stores in the Republic of Korea (South Korea) have also been pivotal in introducing foreign culture by popularizing Western customs and trends from Japan. Seoul department stores became focal arenas of fashion couture, while department stores in other areas disseminated these new trends to smaller cities. In Seoul the rise of a middle-class consciousness was strongly associated with frequenting the city's glistening new department stores as opposed to shopping in traditional market districts like Namdaemun (South Market) or Tongdaemun (East Market). Among status-oriented female consumers, shopping for daily family goods at department stores rather than at open markets became a sign of rising family status.

South Korean department stores have hosted entertainment and educational offerings within stores and in addition have established other amusement centers. The department store conglomerate Lotte built the entertainment theme park Lotte World, an amusement park similar to Disneyland in concept but featuring Lotte's own characters, in a Lotte department store on the outskirts of Seoul.

China

Chinese department stores also mirror historical changes, further development of urban centers, and the rising middle class. The immense early-twentieth-century entrepreneurial development in China's main cities was reflected in the rise of department stores. Shanghai in particular became a major industrial and commercial center after the end of the Sino-Japanese war in 1895. Nanjing Road, Shanghai's version of New York's Fifth Avenue, saw the birth of glamorous department stores that offered the increasing numbers of middle-class customers a different shopping experience from traditional shops and markets. Along with the visible array of a wide spectrum of goods, fixed prices, and extensive services, these Chinese department stores provided rooftop tea gardens, music recitals, and dancing parties. Sincere department store had an attached hotel, showing that a trip to Shanghai for shopping had itself become a vacation objective. Chinese department stores mediated the transition to Westernization and modernization, tutoring customers on issues of style and essentials of modern life. As in Japan, department stores were linked to the development of railroads and involved a reinterpretation of the merchant classes. Whereas traditionally merchants had been seen as unproductive to society, merchants were increasingly seen as entrepreneurs whose economic activity could be advantageous to society, partly because of the rising prominence of department stores.

Regional Trends

East Asian department stores have influenced women's employment and domestic roles. In 1900 Sincere department store caused a sensation with the opening of a Hong Kong branch with female shop clerks; previously women were employed only in family shops. Due to the public outcry over this public employment of women at that time, these women were laid off, but by the late 1930s female sales clerks were an accepted part of Chinese department stores. In Japan, even before the Equal Employment Opportunity Law of 1985, department stores promoted more women to managerial positions than did other private or government concerns because the overwhelming proportion of both department-store employees and walk-in customers were women.

Another trend has involved the establishment of large Japanese and Chinese retailing concerns in Europe, North America, and Australia. Some of these stores, such as Yaohan, were considered extended supermarkets in their home countries but have been perceived as department stores in the foreign context. These stores primarily cater to Asian customers abroad and to Asian-descent populations, but they also appeal to non-Asian Westerners. Where East Asian department stores have long introduced Western goods and culture to Asian countries, now the reverse is also true. Stores originate in East Asia, and they transmit food, styles, fashions, culture, and trends from their Asian countries of origin to the Western countries where they do business, thereby acting as mediators between culture and consumption.