Crossing Thresholds
In his December 1928 essay, "The Sociology of Department Store Customs," the architect and self-proclaimed "modernologist" Kon Wajiro (1888–1973) discussed the results of the survey he conducted with his students of Mitsukoshi on November 25 of the same year. Kon begins:
"I would like to introduce contemporary urban customs in an interesting way, and the suggestion of an editor (for Women's Friend) was to provide an account of "inside a department store." I need to give a sense of the things we saw as bystanders or objective observers, such as which people crowd into the store and what is it like floor by floor at different kinds of retail counters."
That Sunday afternoon architect Kon Wajirō had his students stationed themselves outside key exits of the central Nihombashi store branch to take careful notes on the genders, ages, hairstyles, clothing, and groupings of customers who left during a half-hour period. While the data sample was small, Kon and his students nevertheless compiled an illuminating sketch of the Mitsukoshi customers in the late 1920s, which Kon supplemented with brief discussions of past and future trends.
While a one-day survey could only yield very preliminary and limited results, in the absence of other such studies, this data is invaluable. In the gallery on this page, all of the diagrams for Kon's essay are available for your examination. How does Kon and his team's attention to people and their movements build a sense of space?
You might start by considering where Kon and his students principally set themselves up: at store entrances. These critical boundaries between exterior and interior were relatively egalitarian sites: no matter which floor was one’s destination, one had to pass through these gateways. At the same time, the data gathered on clothing and hair styles helps populate the store floors for us in a manner most photographs from the time did not. We learn that Mitsukoshi was less of a female preserve that its counterparts in Europe and the United States, with the numbers of men and women roughly equal. While both children and older people were present, the most common age bracket for customers was the mid- to late twenties. Visitors also tended to be mid- to upper class, though not exclusively so. Both Western and Japanese fashions were well represented among all customers, with men more likely to be wearing suits and women more likely to be wearing kimono. Seventy-five percent of the shoppers that day entered as individuals, while the remaining twenty-five percent were configured into groups of various sizes. On the one hand, the data gathered by Kon and his team indicate that Mitsukoshi had successfully constructed an environment to attract a highly desirable, fashionable and well-heeled, demographic. On the other, the flow of these and others through the store impelled it further along this path of melding social stratification with egalitarianism, Western wonder and Japanese custom, and appealing to men, women, and families.
Kon also contributed this essay on luxury prohibitions and clothing to the journal Mitsukoshi in 1940.
