The Shinjuku flagship: an ambition thirty-five years in waiting (1991)

The ambition, and the weight of the rent

The heart of this decision is that an old house chose again, with its fortunes on the table, a market it had once let go thirty-five years earlier. Shinjuku is the greatest trade area in the capital region, layered with railway lines, and not holding a core store there had long defined Takashimaya’s weakness in Tokyo. When president Hidaka called it “a thirty-year ambition,” that was not sentiment so much as a frank admission of the limits of a Tokyo strategy tied to a single store at Nihonbashi. To carry the memory of the defeat and still take a second bet on the same market is what gives this judgment its weight.

Realizing the ambition did not, however, amount to succeeding at it. Sales far below plan and heavy rent held the distance between owning a store and earning from one in front of Takashimaya for years. Building a giant store on leased land is a double-edged choice: it aims at lightness and binds the business with rent as a fixed cost. Fulfilling an ambition and making it pay are separate problems. The record of the Shinjuku store carries forward a difficulty general to any store-opening decision — the stronger the craving for a location, the harder the design of its recovery is questioned.