According to the class reading[1], in 1994 Japan had over “twice as many small retail stores per thousand population” and that “individual ownership accounted for 61%” of stores. In recent years the Japanese retail world has developed to include about five different kinds of stores in competition with each other: the individually-owned small store, the department store, the conbini, the discount store, and the mega mall. As these different stores have cropped up, they have threatened the success of the mom-and-pop store and Mak and Sunder seem to believe that their appearance on the scene is going to completely transform the touristic landscape by eliminating of these small stores. After going to Kichijoji, however, I feel that this premonition is an exaggerated fear and that these stores have a great propensity for coexistence.

Walking around Kichijoji, it occurred to me that there is a very obvious reason that there have been so many small stores in Japan, and that is space. Space is limited. The alleyways in which many of these stores are located are tiny, almost impossible to see at times, difficult to maneuver and PACKED with store space from start to finish. Sales per store – especially small restaurants, like the Ramen shop I ate in – are so low because in any given store there is only the space to serve five people at a time. There is a proportionately smaller space to house their merchandise, and just as small a space for the workers to operate from. The Ramen shop at maximum could fit three workers at a given time.

While the appearance of department stores and megamalls in Japan brings to mind the scary, and cultureless image of a giant sterile shopping center filled with chain stores and discount shops, I do not foresee this happening in Japan. Even now in Kichijoji I feel that there is a healthy mix of the old and new, the large and the small, and what these stores have to offer varies in more than price. I passed one small food store selling strange, fresh vegetables out of barrels. An old man was sitting on a stool in the center waiting for customers in his short pants and t-shirt. When people buy from him they are buying food and a feeling that cannot be achieved by going to Lawson’s or a supermarket. Small shops provide individual service – like the storeowner in the reading who walked upstairs to ask his wife the proper way to cook a bag of rice – and they also often provide fresher and more personalized merchandise. Just as in America discount stores are popular, there are still people willing to pay more at a regular retail or department store for higher quality goods. There is clearly a history of coexistence as well as a competition among business enterprises, small or large.

At the same time, it makes sense that the percentage of small stores is decreasing. As new actors appear in competition, a balance must be reached. Yet after seeing the environment of both small and large stores I do not think that reaching this balance, even at the cost of some small stores, is necessarily bad. From a consumer and tourist perspective, I appreciate that I can buy bananas at discount for 82 yen at Seiyu and bowl of tsukemen, priced at 1050 yen at a local Ramen shop. I could probably find it for less elsewhere, but I doubt that there the workers bang on their pots and pans and steam from the food still cooking rises right up in front of you.

Standing in Kichijoji it seemed to me to be an excellent physical expression of the old coexisting with the new: a large train station located both down the street from the Marui department store, and one or two blocks of small nameless food and clothing stores, most filled to bursting with patrons – albeit that meaning only five or six. Each type of store will never be able to replicate what the other store has to offer its patrons, and because of that I am convinced that small stores are in Ja