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City Places for City People

A City of Shopkeepers

by Tom Gally

The New Shimbashi Building in central Tokyo. The blue sign on the roof advertises a discount store that sells business suits. The sandwich-board man in the lower left is advertising a massage parlor, and the man on his right is holding an advertisement for a loan shark.

On a weekday afternoon, on the sidewalks around the New Shimbashi Building, you may see men wearing sandwich boards that advertise loan sharks and massage parlors; homeless people selling magazines and books that they have scavanged from trash cans; a man selling watches and jewelry arrayed on a board placed atop packing crates (and hovering over his display will be several people he has paid to pretend to be eager customers); lottery ticket sellers in tiny booths, doing brisk business if today is an auspicious day on the traditional calendar but not so busy otherwise; and old women crouched on the sidewalk, shining the shoes of salesmen and out-of-town businessmen who are on their way to meet clients in the office buildings nearby.

The New Shimbashi Building is across a narrow one-way street from the elevated tracks that run through the Shimbashi railway station. A half-dozen blocks from the luxury boutiques of Ginza, a mile from the home of the Emperor in the Imperial Palace, it is an unremarkable structure architecturally, somehow both awkward and nondescript. The broad base of the building is four stories high and covered with a white concrete lattice. Rising above the base is an oblong black steel tower. The tower contains offices and apartments. The base is filled with shops.

The corridors on the first floor are the busiest, for through them passes a steady stream of people going to and from the train station. Just inside the southeast entrance is a pachinko parlor, noisy with the clatter of bells and falling balls and loudspeaker exhortations to the gamblers. There's a chain store that sells cheap suits, several shops that buy and sell tickets and gift certificates at discounts, restaurant counters that serve homemade curry and greasy Chinese food, a jewelry shop, a necktie shop, a stand-up fruit juice bar, a small bookshop, and three newly installed Internet vending machines at which you can stand and access the Web at ten minutes for a hundred yen.

The shops in the New Shimbashi Building can be said to cater to businessmen, if by "businessmen" you mean not only entrepreneurs and company employees but also stationery jobbers and facsimile repairmen and leasing agents and miscellaneous fixers and hustlers and gangsters--in other words, any man in Tokyo who wears a suit. While the salarymen in the nearby office towers live well-regulated work lives focused on their bosses, their colleagues, and their future promotions and retirements, many of the men who patronize the shops in the New Shimbashi Building evince a rootlessness born of both ambition and despair. To see the ambition, look at the printing shops. There are five or six small printers that offer to produce business cards quickly--in thirty minutes at most shops, in twenty-nine minutes at a recent upstart competitor. In a city where a business card is both an identification and an identity, these shops serve clients for whom a fixed identity need not be a barrier to accomplishment. To see the despair, look at the finance shops that offer quick loans, with few questions asked, at high rates of interest to men who have walked in off the street. Some of the money lent there no doubt recirculates within the New Shimbashi Building itself, to the bars in the basement and the gambling dens on the upper floors, not to mention the massage parlors with names like D-Cup and Wonderful Office.

A noodle shop a few steps from the New Shimbashi Building, in an area of narrow alleys and two-story buildings. The split curtain over the door indicates that the store is open for business, as do the samples of lunch specials displayed on the table on the right.

Tokyo is a city of shopkeepers, and their shops create the city and define it. The shops in the New Shimbashi Building and the sellers on the streets around it are just a few of the hundreds of thousands of retail establishments that reflect the myriad of worlds that coexist within Tokyo. If you cross the street that runs along the south side of the New Shimbashi Building, you enter a neighborhood of narrow streets lined on both sides with hundreds of more shops. There's a barbershop partially hidden, as many small shops are, by the potted plants kept by the proprietor. The shop seems to have been there for decades. The phone number on the awning is still the seven-digit version that became obsolete more than a decade ago, and the typeface of the lettering is even older, harking back to the 1960s or earlier. The proprietor might be the shop's founder, now mature in years after decades in the same location, or the founder's son or daughter-in-law or nephew or granddaughter. There are shops in Tokyo that have been handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years, though rarely in the same building, for much of Tokyo has been leveled more than once by fire and war.

The barber shop described in the article. The shop's name is "Pelican."

Some of the old shops have grown into huge department store chains or multinational corporations, while others still sell only tea or rice or fish, just as they did centuries ago.

And every day new shops are born, for it is not difficult to open a shop in Tokyo. With an idea and some capital, anyone can do it, regardless of education or family background or formal qualifications or other factors that determine--and hinder--advancement in so many other fields. Competition is stiff, though, for good ideas are rare and quickly stolen, especially for shops that require no special skills to operate. Tokyo used to be filled with thousands of small coffee shops that sold a small selection of beverages and easily prepared snacks. You did not need to be a talented chef to operate one--just brew the coffee, toast the bread, and serve the customers. But there were too many of them, and rising rents and stiffening competition in the 1980s drove more than half of them out of business.

After the coffee shops came a series of other no-skill businesses that seemed to offer higher profit margins. In the late 1980s, billiard parlors started cropping up around the city as small-time entrepreneurs tried to cash in on what the media reported was a "boom" in billiards. However, that boom, if it ever existed, soon went bust, and where billiard parlors used to be, karaoke rooms appeared instead. Sing-along machines had been around for some time, but now the background music and visuals could be piped in over cable, eliminating the need for the proprietor to stock each room with a full set of tapes. Soon the supply of karaoke spaces outstripped demand, though, and in their place appeared a new twist on an old standard: manga coffee shops stocked with thousands of comic books that customers are charged by the hour to read. The manga coffee shops began sprouting up in earnest in the late 1990s, and though many are still in business they seem likely to be replaced soon by whatever the next copycat fad will be.

A small food shop. It is morning, so the display on the left is still covered. The banner advertises bento, or prepared box lunches.

Many shops seem like a person at a certain stage of life. Young shops are energetic, ambitious, rough around the edges. Their proprieters, even if middle-aged or older, do not seem jaded yet, or burned out. Most of the fad shops are young, and so of course are most of the trendy boutiques and restaurants that sprout up and disappear in the fashionable parts of town. But even traditional shops selling vegetables or futons or tofu can be young in spirit as well. Middle-aged shops are stolid, respectable, unexciting, dependable. Shopping arcades in residential neighborhoods are populated mostly by middle-aged shops: mom-and-pop groceries, pharmacies, rice shops, liquor stores, stationery stores, restaurants. And here and there throughout the city, in back alleys and in high-rent areas, you sometimes run across shops that are clearly nearing the ends of their days. They seem tired, senile, hard of hearing. The windows are unwashed, the clerks are sullen, the shelves are half-empty, the aisles are cluttered with boxes and empty of customers. A quick estimate of the probable rent and overhead versus the profit margin on the obviously dwindling sales tells you that the shop must be losing money, and you wonder how it manages to survive. Often, it seems, such shops stay open only because their proprieters have no other options but to continue to the bitter end.

Small shops have never had it easy. Huge department stores, with their vast selection of goods, have stolen customers since the early 20th century. Predatory landlords, protection rackets, and the inefficiencies of small scale have always taken a toll. In recent years, the two biggest threats have been the computer and the automobile.

The computer is a threat not in itself but in what it makes possible: the efficiencies of large scale applied on a local, customized basis. Ever since Japan's first convenience store, a 7-Eleven, opened in an industrial area near Tokyo's waterfront in 1974, tens of thousands of convenience stores have sprung up throughout the country, so many that in some neighborhoods competing convenience stores are just a few steps apart. The shelves in the clean, brightly lit stores are stocked with goods that are chosen and arranged based on real-time analyses of sales trends and delivered every few hours throughout the day. At convenience stores, besides buying food or underwear or magazines or soft drinks, you can pay utility bills, buy concert tickets, download video game software, send packages, make copies, and withdraw money from your bank account. When a convenience store moves in, it's hard for the dingy, concrete-floored grocery store next door to survive.

A shop that sells and repairs shoes. Once again, the store's wares spill out onto the street. When this photograph was taken, three people were chatting and laughing inside the cramped store. The man sitting down was wearing sandals because his shoes were being repaired while he waited.

The automobile is a threat because, now that most Japanese have cars, they are more likely to do their shopping at suburban malls and supermarkets with parking lots. The shops in many older neighborhoods depend entirely on passing pedestrian traffic for their patronage. Around the New Shimbashi Building and elsewhere in central Tokyo, where driving is difficult and parking is expensive, the small shops have managed to hold on. At the city's edges and beyond, though, they are rapidly disappearing.

The forces of retail homogenization--franchises, strip malls, warehouse stores--are steadily gaining ground in Japan. In the suburbs they have already won, but they face a tougher fight in Tokyo, where the small shopkeepers continue to oppose them. And on the streets of Shimbashi and elsewhere, where shopless shopkeepers sell clothing and video tapes and bootleg software, the guerrilla resistance is making a brave stand.

Tom Gally is a freelance translator and writer who has lived in Japan since 1983. To learn more about his life and work, go to www.gally.net.