1 · Position
Mitsui Takatoshi opened Echigoya in 1673 on Honchō 1-chōme, the busiest merchant street in Edo, in a rented shopfront a ken and a half wide. Fire pushed the shop a block south to Surugachō in 1683, and he used the move to announce a new way of selling: 現銀掛値なし — cash on the counter, and one price for everyone. Where other drapers served feudal houses on credit at negotiated prices, he sold on the spot to an emerging middle class. It became a department store in 1904 and is the root of the Mitsui group.
2 · ⚑ A correction to this Library
Earlier in this same working session the Library recorded Aristide Boucicaut as the inventor of the fixed price, and said that everything in this group descends from Le Bon Marché. That is wrong, and the error is Eurocentric rather than merely factual. Echigoya was doing it in 1683. Boucicaut's achievement stands — he built the department store as a place to spend a day, and his innovations reached Europe independently — but he was not first to the fixed price and the register now says so on both entries.
3 · What Japan added
The *depachika*, the basement food hall, is a Japanese contribution with no European ancestor, and the Japanese stores function almost as retail-supported craft museums — handwoven baskets and lathe-turned bowls beside the couture. Meticulous service, elaborate wrapping and the food hall together are why the Library files these stores as hospitality rather than as retail.
4 · Candour
The house has had a hard modern history the celebratory accounts omit: eight consecutive years of consolidated losses into 1999, a passed dividend for the first time since listing, 600 job cuts announced and about 1,150 voluntary retirements. Its charge-account customers were ageing and part-timers made up about 15 per cent of staff against more than 40 per cent at Isetan and Takashimaya. The oldest department store in Japan very nearly did not survive the 1990s.