Midoriya takes capital from Seibu and joins the retail group (1976)

The end of an instalment retailer, and its rebirth in finance

The heart of this decision lay in how the founding family would draw a line under the company’s own history at the moment when the instalment department store, as a business format, was reaching the end of its usefulness. The first transfusion, from Marubeni, brought capital and modernization, but it did not fill the one gap that mattered — retailing expertise. What Midoriya sought in the second transfusion was less money than the know-how to survive low growth, and it is possible to read Okamoto, close to retirement, as looking for a fitting last act in the Seibu retail group, the most vivid embodiment of that know-how. In the care taken to appear not as a loser withdrawing but as a company choosing, of its own will, to join the group everyone was talking about, one can see a founder’s pride.

In the event, Sakakura’s declaration that Midoriya would overtake Marui was never fulfilled on the ground of the instalment department store. But the company itself did not disappear: it changed shape into Seibu Credit and then Credit Saison, and was reborn as the core of the group’s credit and finance. The aftermath of the tie-up is concentrated in that single point — the ceiling of one business format became the doorway into another. Whatever the participants of the day could actually foresee, the path by which a company defeated as a retailer recovered as a financier looks, in hindsight, to have been latent in the choice to enter the Seibu retail group.