Modeling Consumption
Even though Kon Wajiro's team found that the numbers of male and female customers were very roughly equal, the evolution of Mitsukoshi's models demonstrate a concerted attempt to identify the store as a space configured specifically for women. Before and during the transformation of Mitsukoshi into a Western-style department store, the retailer frequently employed popular geisha as models for its latest textile patterns or to draw attention to an upcoming event. These women were chosen for their ability to attract male attention, which made sense in the early modern period, when the majority of its customers were, in fact, men. However, as Mitsukoshi cemented its identity by the 1910s, it turned to a new kind of model, one intended to attract women (as well as men).
Instead of geisha, the recurring image in posters and other forms of advertisement was a woman figured as a Mitsukoshi customer. Generally, these women were young matrons shown at leisure, perhaps reading or playing music, in gorgeously appointed households, or in transit, waiting for a subway or walking on a street, clearly on the way to Mitsukoshi. In short, the models were aspirational figures.
The store space itself was also explicitly configured to invite female customers as household managers within a family matrix, with children’s fairs, model rooms, lavish rest areas and dining rooms, and the like. In contrast, European and American department store targeted women as individuals.
A Mitsukoshi representative sent abroad in 1932 was in fact struck by how heavily tilted the gender ratios for Western department store customers were: “Parisian department store customers are 99 percent adult women, with very few male customers. About the only time one sees children brought along or the family as a group like in Japan is during Christmas sales.” While Western department stores employed floor detectives to catch individual customers so overwhelmed with desire that they succumbed to the temptation to shoplift, Japanese department stores were able to more effectively implement an exhibitionary self-regulation regime by integrating families. The household, perceived in this context as characterized by female leadership and not by female isolation, would keep an eye on itself to uphold respectability.
