Company history

Takashimaya began in 1831 as a used-clothing and cotton-goods dealer at Karasuma-Matsubara in Kyoto. The first Iida Shinshichi did not invent the name: Takashimaya was his father-in-law’s trading name, taken from Takashima in Omi province, and the business started by borrowing an existing shop sign and the credit that came with it. Some twenty years in, in 1852, Iida dropped used clothing for kimono fabrics and pushed the house toward design — improving yuzen and embroidery patterns and, through better dyeing, producing velvet yuzen. In a street lined with rivals, the trade had shifted from reselling cloth to making it.

Two events then set the shape of the company. A commission to supply decorations for the 1887 construction of the Imperial Palace led on to appointment as a purveyor to the Imperial Household. And in 1888 Takashimaya abandoned zauri — the universal practice of seating a customer on tatami while a clerk fetched bolts of cloth — for open display selling. Putting goods out to be looked at was, twenty years early, the department store’s method. Osaka was won more slowly: peddling first, a branch office at Dojima in 1896, a move to Shinsaibashi in 1898 with heavy advertising, and in 1907 a rebuilt store in full display format.

Tokyo came from official demand rather than consumer demand — as purveyorships to the Imperial Household and government offices multiplied, a Tokyo base became necessary: a temporary office in Nihonbashi in 1897, a store in Kyobashi from 1900. In 1909 the eighty-year-old sole proprietorship was reorganized as Iida Takashimaya, an unlimited partnership capitalized at ¥1 million, with the fourth Iida Shinshichi as president. The Kyoto store was rebuilt in 1912; the first Hyakusenkai design exhibition, held in 1913 and twice a year thereafter, made the company a setter of fashion rather than a follower. In December 1916 a Kyoto-style store opened at Minami-Denmacho in Tokyo — Kyoto’s designs and Kyoto’s selling method transplanted whole, the branch built as an equal of the head store rather than an outpost.

On 20 August 1919 the firm became Takashimaya Gofukuten, a joint-stock company capitalized at ¥3 million, with its head office on Karasuma in Kyoto and stores in Kyoto, Shinsaibashi in Osaka and Minami-Denmacho in Tokyo. The three-city structure was now fixed in corporate form. Its market position settled at the same time: trade papers of 1928 placed Takashimaya with Matsuzakaya as the practical, mass-market houses, against a Mitsukoshi that sold to the wealthy.

In December 1930 the name was shortened to Takashimaya — gofukuten, “kimono shop,” no longer described what the business was — and a store opened inside the Nankai building at Namba. Namba was a bet on infrastructure that did not yet exist: the widening of Midosuji and the subway then being planned. The Umeda–Namba line opened in May 1933, nearly three years after the store. Trade papers warned from opening day that the rent on the Nankai building was heavy — the first appearance of a problem that would recur. The full store followed in July 1932 at some 13,000 tsubo; in January 1933 capital was raised to ¥14 million for a new eight-storey Tokyo store, and that March the Tokyo store moved to Nihonbashi. By 1936 the press was calling Midosuji, where Takashimaya, Daimaru and Sogo faced the street, Osaka’s shopping district. The bet had been collected with the city’s growth.

The war ran the other way. Controls tightened, selling floors were requisitioned, and with domestic growth closed off Takashimaya went to the continent — branches and offices in Xinjing, Mukden and across Korea, Manchuria and China. At home the Nagahori store was folded into Namba in 1939, and in March 1944 the head office itself moved from Kyoto to Namba in Osaka: the seat of the company left the city where it was founded for the commercial centre of the Kansai. In February 1947 it was designated under the Deconcentration Law and slated for break-up; the designation was revoked that May. The continental branches were formally abolished in September 1948 and replaced with stores in Wakayama and Beppu, and by 1949 export bazaars in Tokyo and Osaka were selling to foreign customers under the Occupation.

In April 1949 Takashimaya issued a convertible bond underwritten by Nomura Securities — the first in Japan. Rebuilding selling floors demanded working capital on a scale that rights issues alone could not supply, so the company reached for an instrument nobody had used. The following month it listed on the Osaka and Tokyo stock exchanges, and the conversions were absorbed into four successive capital increases that took paid-in capital to ¥550 million by October 1952 and ¥1.1 billion by September 1953. The money went into buildings, and the buildings forced a choice: in August 1952 the founding Karasuma store was closed and small provincial stores pruned, concentrating everything on big-city selling floors. By 1954 annual sales were ¥20 billion.

The one place it could not build was Shinjuku. From 1955 Takashimaya sought a place in the Japanese National Railways station building there, president Iida Naojiro petitioning the railway directly. Local merchants formed the “League to Oppose a Department Store in Shinjuku Station,” arguing that a store inside the concourse would swallow most of the passengers and put shops along the Chuo, Keio and Odakyu lines out of business — the Daimaru store at Tokyo Station was cited as the precedent. Takashimaya answered that a station building could not pay for itself without the surrounding shops and had planned for coexistence, but the authorities took the local side and the plan was withdrawn in 1956. Tokyo would remain a one-store operation at Nihonbashi for the next thirty-five years. Abroad the company moved earlier and more freely, opening on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1958, the first Japanese department store to do so.

The domestic network was then built not as branches but as regional subsidiaries — Yokohama Takashimaya in 1957, Tokyo Store in 1960, Yonago in 1961, Omiya in 1968, Keiyo in 1970, and Okayama, Takasaki, Senboku and Yanagen through to 1974 — separate companies being easier to pair with local capital. Around the retail core the company also placed operating companies that captured the margins a department store would otherwise hand to outsiders: Toshin Kaihatsu (December 1963), which developed and ran the Tamagawa store from 1969 and turned that experience into a shopping-centre business, and Takashimaya Credit (August 1986), which kept a cardholder base tied directly to store sales out of the banks’ hands. From the mid-1970s the scattered subsidiaries were pulled back in — mergers among them in 1975 and 1983, the parent absorbing Kanto Takashimaya in 1990, and five more companies at once in September 1995. And in November 1991, thirty-five years after the defeat, Takashimaya announced a Shinjuku store. President Hidaka Kei called it “a thirty-year ambition,” said the plan was to raise share in the capital with Nihonbashi and Shinjuku as twin cores, and projected first-year sales of about $1.2B (¥160bn).

The Shinjuku store opened in October 1996 — forty years after the first defeat, five after the announcement — and missed. Fiscal 1998 sales were $574.5M (¥75bn), less than half the $1.2B (¥160bn) originally projected; president Tanaka Tatsuro said he wanted at least ¥90 billion and conceded that the thirteen-year payback would slip. The ground was leased, and rent of roughly $64.4M (¥7bn) a year stayed on the books long after. The same years brought a scandal over payments to sokaiya racketeers, settled in April 1997 when nine current and former directors jointly paid $1.4M (¥170m) and the company agreed to open its shareholder meetings to the press.

In Nagoya the company tried the opposite structure. When JR Central built its twin towers over Nagoya Station, Takashimaya took an equity stake in the operating company — named JR Nagoya Takashimaya by July 1997 — and licensed its name, rather than building and leasing on its own account. There was internal caution about depending on a partner, but the group had no store in the Chukyo region at all. Opened in March 2000, it drew 38.4 million visitors in its first year against Shinjuku’s 33 million, took $564.3M (¥61bn) against a ¥50 billion target, and returned an ordinary profit of $7.1M (¥770m) where a loss had been budgeted; accumulated losses, planned to clear in twenty years, were gone in four. Freed from the pressure to fill a building it owned, the team had spent three years on the floors themselves — Rose Patio rest areas on prime central space on every level, ceilings 20cm higher than standard — and overturned the industry’s belief that a station-top store could not work.

Overseas Takashimaya kept going in alongside its property arm: Singapore (company 1989, store 1993), Shanghai (2009 / 2012), Ho Chi Minh City (2013 / 2016), Bangkok (2015 / 2018). At home it spun regional stores back out again — Yonago in 2003, Okayama, Gifu and Takasaki in 2004 — and sold Yonago outright in 2020. A 2008 agreement to merge with H2O Retailing, owner of Hankyu and Hanshin, would have created the industry’s largest operating profit and was billed as an alliance of two strong operators rather than a rescue; it was abandoned in April 2010, Suzuki Koji explaining that the more the two sides discussed merchandising, stores, personnel and systems, the more their thinking diverged. Then the pandemic: in the year to February 2021 the group posted a net loss of ¥34.0 billion, department stores losing ¥21.3 billion at the operating line while shopping-centre development still earned ¥5.8 billion — the clearest possible statement of where the group’s profit actually came from. Operating profit recovered to ¥57.5 billion by February 2025, but the direction had changed: the department-store floors at Tachikawa closed in January 2023 and Gifu in July 2024, while the April 2024 medium-term plan adopted ROIC as the measure of every business and pushed capital toward property and finance — some $99M (¥15bn) into residential lots in Haiphong, Vietnam, on the view, as president Murata Yoshio put it, that Japan and ASEAN are “a single trading area.”