1 · Position
The building on Chungmu-ro opened on 20 October 1930 as the Gyeongseong branch of Mitsukoshi — LHL-S-168 Mitsukoshi in this Library — during the Japanese occupation. Mitsukoshi closed in 1945; the store became Donghwa, was run as a US military PX during the Korean War, and was acquired in 1963 by Lee Byung-chull of Samsung and renamed. Shinsegae announced its separation from Samsung in 1991 and completed it in 1997.
2 · ⚑ The dispute the Library does not settle
Shinsegae dates itself from the 1930 opening. Korean critics object that Mitsukoshi Gyeongseong was built with Japanese capital and has nothing to do with the present company except the building, and that treating it as the origin of Korean department stores is a distortion; the company answers that it says *opened* rather than *founded*, which critics call a further evasion. Some scholars argue the first store to use the title in Korea was Kyungsung Hirata in 1926. The National Archives records Shinsegae's main branch as the first department store in Korea. The Library states all of it and chooses none: the corporate founding is 9 December 1955, the building is 1930, and the argument is about what a house inherits from an occupier.
3 · Why it is in the Library
Two firsts that are not disputed. Centum City in Busan is the largest department store in the world at 293,900 square metres, taking the title from Macy's Herald Square in 2009. And Shinsegae issued Korea's first credit card, running it from 1967 to 2000 — a retailer inventing the country's consumer finance, which is the department-store model of this group taken to its furthest point.
4 · Candour
The building appears in Yi Sang's novel *Wings*, which places it in Korean literature as a colonial object rather than a national achievement. Shinsegae's regional strategy — local subsidiaries banking locally, paying tax locally, funding transport interchanges, 800 billion won in Daegu — is recorded as the company's own account of itself.