Japanese Department Store as a Taste Cultivator
“Taste, the propensity, and capacity to appropriate ( materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, is the generative formula of lifestyle, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of earth of the symbolic sub-spaces…”
— Pierre Bourdieu 1984
The New Clientele of Mitsukoshi Department Store: Yamanotezoku
With the dissolution of the feudal system and the waning of the “old cultural elites”, such as court nobles and the samurai, at the turn of the 20th century, the burgeoning urban middle class burst onto the scene. The process of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the vitality of the new middle class, enriched and diversified the cultural landscape within cities. Mitsukoshi’s transformation from gofukuten (呉服店)to the modern department store was undertaken in the midst of the dramatic socio-cultural change back to that time. A privileged few was gradually replaced by the burgeoning urban middle class. As it is indicated in research by Minami Hiroshi, between 1907 and 1923, the percentage of middle-class household significantly increased from three percent to twelve percent [1]. With high-quality kimono, which as a symbol of wealth, as the major product, feudal lords, merchant capitalists, and aristocracy constituted the core clientele of Mitsukoshi gofukuten. On the other hand, situated in a different sociocultural context, Mitsukoshi department store expanded its assortment of merchandise to bags, shoes, umbrellas, cosmetics, stationery, artworks, and a wide variety of imported goods. Accordingly, the core clientele shifted to the modern middle-class dwelling in the urban area, who was known as Yamanotezoku, or Yamanote people.
Yamanote people was first referred to as the burgeoning urban middle class inhabiting in the Yamanote district [2] which was connected to the Tokyo downtown by the Yamanote line, a commuter rail line starting operation from the late 19th century. Later, the term, Yamanotezoku, was widely used to refer to the modern middle class living in Tokyo as well as other cities. The new urban middle class was comprised of professors, civil servants, bankers, doctors, military officers, social elites working in large trading corporations, and other white-collar workers, who generally supported the Westernizing craze promoted by the state.
Taste: The Conspicuous Marker of Social Position
In the light of the dominant discourse of “fine art”, the autonomy of art is highly valued. Accordingly, one’s aesthetic preferences and taste are supposed to be autonomous as well. However, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, the production of a legitimate cultural discourse is a symbolic production. Thus, taste is never innate but concerns “the capacity to discern”, or in Pierre Bourdieu (1984) words, “the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir)”.
As the rising cultural elites, Yamanote people were willing and eager to embrace novel products and ideas. However, many of them had never socialized in the cultural setting still limited to the purview of the privileged few, and thus were lack of the taste and “cultural competence to indulge their craving for high culture”, as Younjung Oh (2014) elaborates it. In a land that vigorously propagated the idea of cultured life, failure to demonstrate and command proper taste and cultural literacy to socialize would possibly lead to the exclusion from the inner circle of cultural nobility. The anxiety of the exclusion is exemplified in Tōkyōgaku (A Study of Tokyo) by Ishikawa Tengai published in 1909, which functioned as a guide to educate the new Tokyoites the importance of commanding proper taste in social settings. Eventually, “individual taste and the cultivation of culture became vital to the negotiation of one’s social position in this fluid moment of modern Japan”, as Younjung Oh (2014) puts it.
Mitsukoshi Department Store: a Taste Cultivator
During the liminal stage between the waning of the “old cultural elites” and the rising of the new social elites who aspired to legitimate their social positions through demonstrating refined taste, the “crack” offered an ideal space for Mitsukoshi department stores to come into play. Mitsukoshi was a prominent cultivator and creator of the taste and the lifestyle catered to yamanotezoku, which termed as Mitsukoshi shumi , or Mitsukoshi taste. For instance, in an article published to announce its establishment of art section in 1907, Mitsukoshi stated, ” If there were no art in the world, it would be desolate..if we could not see fine works of art, it would be impossible for us to have shumi…As a gofukuten which deals with designs suggesting new taste, Mitsukoshi cannot neglect fine art and has decided to establish an art section”. In another marketing campaign to celebrate the grand opening of Imperial Theatre in 1913, Mitsukoshi meticulously adopted the famous slogan “Today the imperial theater, tomorrow Mitsukoshi” （「今日は帝劇 明日は三越」）to bundle itself with the first Western-style theater in Japan and to rebound to its own cultural prominence.
For Mitsukoshi, constructing the taste and lifestyle which could saturate the fabric of the everyday life of yamanotezoku was a brilliant marketing strategy to “equate shopping with aesthetic sophistication”, as Louise Young(1999) phrases it. Furthermore, it was a means to accumulate its cultural capitals, and to consolidate its cultural and aesthetic authority (Oh 2012, 13). Positioning itself as the test setter was a particularly smart strategy since taste was exactly the major matters of concern for the burgeoning urban middle class. For the urban middle class, shopping in the space surrounded with the aura of the high culture gave them the illusion and perception that they were moving toward the circle of cultural nobility.
Mitsukoshi House Magazine: the Key Interface to Disseminate Mitsukoshi Taste
Mitsukoshi also pioneers in publishing the first department store house magazine in Japan. In 1899, it published its first house magazine, Hanagoromo, whose content was closely aligned with Mitsukoshi’s strategy to become a taste setter for the burgeoning urban middle class. Therefore, rather than merely focusing on the promotion of the commodities, aesthetic ways of life, fashion trends, academic articles and serialized novels by popular authors were also included. Going through several name changes[3], its house magazine Mitsukoshi reached the circulation of over 50,000 issues in 1911. Moreover, nearly 230 people got involved in the publication of the house magazines, which manifests that Mitsukoshi took it seriously and thus poured energies into it.
Mitsukoshi’s house magazine can be considered as the epitome and the messenger of its brand image and Mitsukoshi taste. This is the underlying reason why it was also the media that Mitsukoshi chose to make the announcement of its launch of the art section, as it is discussed above. It is the key interface that Mitsukoshi utilized to speak to the public, to disseminate Mitsukoshi taste and to project the image that Mitsukoshi was an authority in cultural production. As Tomoko Tamari (2006) summarizes, ” For the upper and middle class they were a material catalog and source of cultural information. For the new middle class, they could be a guide-book for new lifestyles…For people in the provinces, they were “the window, through which they could see ideal lifestyles”.
Footnotes:
[1] According to the same research, the percentage of the middle-class household was higher in the urban area, where department stores were.
[2] Yamanote district is also known as the “high city” in Tokyo, mainly populated by intellectuals. On the other hand, the rest of the district in Tokyo was known as ” low city”, or shitamachi （下町）, the older district of Tokyo where the traditional architectures remain and Edokko （江戸っ子）, or the children of Edo, live.
[3] Before the adoption of the term, depātoento sutoa, hyakkaten （百貨店）, which literally means ” hundred goods stores” was widely used to refer to stores like Mitsukoshi.
