Debt-funded national expansion and the biggest store in town — the separate-company empire (1992)

The shadow inside the design for growth

Mizushima’s design was a spreading of risk that let him keep opening stores without banks or shareholders holding him back, and at the same time a device that put the whole reality in one man’s hands. As long as land prices rose, the circuit turned: unrealized gains erased accumulated losses and generated fresh creditworthiness. But that circuit rested its entire weight on a single premise — that land keeps rising — and when the premise reversed, it began to run backwards. Mizushima, a banker who had seen through the limits of the old department-store management, cared about building big stores; what would be sold inside them seems to have come second.

Consolidated accounting and mark-to-market valuation eventually made visible the structure Mizushima had built, and liquidated in one stroke the premises that a forty-year reign had piled up. Dependence on a single main bank, and the removal of the stores from consolidation through the separate-company model, were the propellant that made expansion fast — and equally a structure in which, once the crisis surfaced, nobody could stop the whole. Was the design invented for expansion also, unchanged, the design for collapse? The fate of the huge stores lined up in front of the stations, each the biggest in its city, overlaps with the retreat of the department store as a format, and the question remains open.