Mitsukoshi: Consuming Places
26
Noriko Aso
image_header
4897
2021-06-09T10:49:25-04:00
Tokyo
35.6856, 139.77341
35.6925168,139.7020331
35.67132, 139.76583
Osaka
34.70298, 135.49527
34.61347, 135.50496
34.60367, 135.50063
34.65863, 135.1337
34.74687, 135.3562
34.67193, 135.53149
34.72694, 135.30416
34.68048, 135.50333
34.77146, 135.4676
34.8949, 135.4105
34.70669, 135.49906
34.78126, 135.46973
34.7843, 135.40094
34.74348, 135.35878
34.70536, 135.51002
34.85319, 134.93137
35.6833, 139.7833
Indochina
14.71451, 102.07182
Okinawa
26.337249, 127.781806
Beppu
33.28461, 131.49121
Beijing
39.92284, 116.40120
Miyazaki
31.93678, 131.4233
Nara
34.68899, 135.8398
Hokkaido
43.06461, 141.3468
Niigata
37.90255, 139.02309
Karatsu
33.45017, 129.96813
Tsuruga
35.654632, 136.073904
Saga
33.24944, 130.29979
Kyoto
35.0000, 135.7500
Sakai
34.57326, 135.48299
Fukuoka
33.59035, 130.40171
Kobe
34.69008, 135.19551
Shimonoseki
33.95783, 130.94145
Hyogo
34.69126, 135.18307
Uji
34.88446, 135.79985
Dalian
38.9300387,121.4703256
Seoul
37.5177602,126.903941
Takamatsu
34.3464538,134.0488982
34.694421,135.1204875
Kanazawa
36.5782723,136.6458411
Sendai
38.2657448,140.868584
Ha Long Bay Vietnam
20.91005, 107.1839
Ayutthaya
14.36923, 100.58766
Hanoi
21.00311, 105.82014
Kuala Lumpur
3.139, 101.68685
Columbo
6.92707, 79.86124
Bangkok
13.75633, 100.50176
Bali
-8.27771, 115.09883
Burma
21.91622, 95.95597
Thailand
15.87003, 100.99254
Vietnam
14.05832, 108.27719
Malaysia
4.21048, 101.97576
Singapore
1.35208, 103.81983
Nan'yō
-8.40951, 115.18891
Manila
14.59951, 120.98421
Shanghai
31.2222, 121.4581
1939-1943
Noriko Aso
Mitsukoshi Department Store
Mitsukoshi
Mitsukoshi Department Store's imposing structures have brought spectacle to the experience of upscale shopping in Japan from the early twentieth century. (For further reading, begin with Hatsuda Tōru in Japanese and Kerrie MacPherson and Noriko Aso in English. Hatsuda 1993, 1995; MacPherson 1998; Aso 2014) The distinctive spatiality of Mitsukoshi was also shared with customers outside as well as within major metropolitan areas through the retailer's various catalogs and high-end journals.
In this module, we explore the pages of a wartime run of Mitsukoshi issues, published from 1939 to 1943. The issues opened up for readers not just store interiors but also external spaces, including households and factories, networks of production as well as consumption (Garon and Maclachlan 2006, esp. essay by Yoshimi), and an imperial expansiveness long forgotten in the postwar. These wartime issues reveal how Mitsukoshi’s two- as well as three-dimensional bodies and structures were deeply rooted in an imagined geography of “East” and “West,” whose boundaries were not as clear and stable upon close inspection as they might have appeared from a distance.
"Mitsukoshi: Consuming Places" is intended to function, not so much as a textbook, but as a contextualized archive of visual images and texts. Questions rather than answers are at the heart of this teaching resource. Sometimes they are explicitly articulated, but they can also be generated by a visitor's own context and interests. The materials are sorted by themes, which include gender and imperialism, and present multiple ways of imagining and experiencing spaces. A given set of images and texts will often posses internal tensions or present conflicts with other sets to explore, and it is hoped that visitors will come up with further ways to challenge and organize the materials.
There are three pathways in this module, but visitors should also consider following tags and other forms of links in Bodies and Structures to jump within the module, or across modules. The first pathway provides an initial look at how the retail space of the Mitsukoshi Department came to be, and how central the peopling of this site was to the process. The second pathway introduces the store's journal, Mitsukoshi, and shows how its pages contained a multitude of spaces that variously reinforced, reimagined, or undermined the nature of the store's cultural authority. The third pathway focuses on the store's imperial expansiveness, and concludes with the question of what changes when we pay attention to the dimensionality of the past.