1 · POSITION
Born in Matsusaka in 1622, Takatoshi went to Edo at fourteen to manage his elder brother's kimono store, was sent home, and waited until his brother's death to inherit. He opened Echigoya in Edo in 1673, on Honchō 1-chōme, in a rented shopfront a ken and a half wide. His business skills are said to have come mostly from his mother.
2 · ⚑ 1683
Fire pushed the shop south to Surugachō, and he used the move to announce 現銀掛値なし — cash on the counter, one price for everyone. Other drapers went door to door, served feudal houses on credit and negotiated every sale. Takatoshi sold on the spot, at a posted price, to an emerging middle class — and added selling by demand, cutting cloth to what a customer actually wanted rather than in fixed bolts.
3 · WHY THIS ENTRY MATTERS TO THE LIBRARY
Because the register said otherwise. Earlier in this same working session the Library credited Aristide Boucicaut — LHL-P-380 Aristide Boucicaut — with inventing the fixed price at Le Bon Marché in 1852. Takatoshi did it in 1683, a hundred and sixty-nine years earlier, and the Library had simply not looked outside Europe before making the claim. Both entries now carry the correction. Boucicaut's own achievement is untouched: he built the store as a place to spend a day, which Takatoshi did not.
4 · WHAT FOLLOWED
Echigoya became Mitsukoshi and the root of the Mitsui group, one of the largest industrial combinations in the world. A merchant house that began by posting a price ended as a *zaibatsu*, dissolved in 1946 and reassembled since.
5 · ⚑ WHAT THIS MODEL DOES NOT SOLVE
A fixed price aimed at the middle class is an argument against the carriage trade, and the register records where that ended: by the 1990s Mitsukoshi's ageing charge-account customers and eight straight years of losses left the house needing rescue by a store founded two centuries after it.