The founding: a borrowed shop sign in Kyoto (1831)

How a family trade carried on under a borrowed name became a department store

What this founding shows is not a man raising his own sign from nothing, but a business begun on his father-in-law’s trading name and on the credit built up between Omi and Kyoto. The Takashimaya that the first Iida Shinshichi hung out was a rice dealer’s name, and the house started from a corner of Kyoto’s commercial district as a plain family trade in used clothing and cotton — everyday cloth. Borrowing an existing reputation as a signboard and laying one’s own business over it is a pattern that runs on into the later movement from kimono fabrics outward into the department store.

The second thing visible here is a company that kept the continuity of a family trade while recomposing what it sold and where it sold it. Used clothing and cotton gave way to kimono fabrics; kimono fabrics widened into general retailing including sundries and food; stores accumulated across Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo — all of it inside the frame of a house passing down a name and a headship through the generations. From a small used-clothing shop started under a borrowed name to a large store at Namba built to match the remaking of Midosuji, and on to listing on both stock exchanges, took more than a century.