New Left Review 27, May-June 2004

CHIN-TAO WU

TOKYO’S HIGH-ART EMPORIA

In the West, people seem to prefer to keep the business of buying and selling separate from their aesthetic pleasures. In Japanese consumer culture, by contrast, it has for decades been established practice for shopping to go hand in hand with art. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, department stores in Japan have set up exhibition spaces within their premises as an extra attraction to entice customers to cross their thresholds. The development was part of the evolution that they underwent from their distant origins as kimono shops—the stores, as elsewhere, gradually transcending their original commercial function, and assuming a new and wider role as monuments to urban modernity. Like Bon Marché in Paris, the Tokyo stores would become ‘a permanent fair, an institution, a fantasy world, a spectacle of extraordinary proportions, so that going to the store became an event and an adventure’. [1] Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920, Princeton 1981, p. 167. Not only were they sites—that is, loci—of consumption, but sights—spectacles—of consumption, too. [2] As Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen punningly put it. See Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness, Minneapolis 1994, p. 45. Here the Meiji period’s preoccupation with Westernization was given concrete form—in the ornate Renaissance-style buildings constructed to house the stores, as well as in the large variety of foreign goods on display for sale.

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