Takashimaya Tokyo Store

One Building, Two Architects, Thirty Years

Takashimaya Tokyo Store (髙島屋東京店, Takashimaya Tokyo-ten, known to shoppers as Nihombashi Takashimaya) is a department store building at 2-4-1 Nihombashi, Chuo City, Tokyo, completed in 1933 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 30 June 2009. It was the first department store in Japan to receive the designation. The registered building occupies an entire city block on the west side of Chuo-dori, the avenue running south from Nihombashi towards Ginza, and measures roughly 64.5 metres across the front by 114.9 metres deep on a typical floor, with a footprint of 7,743.46 square metres.

Only about the western third of that block is the original work. In 1930 Nippon Life Insurance, which owned the land, held a design competition for an office-and-department-store building under a brief calling for "modern architecture founded on Oriental taste." Takahashi Teitaro took first prize. Construction began in August 1930 and finished in March 1933, with Obayashi Corporation building it and Sanki Engineering handling the services. The building opened under the name Nippon Seimei-kan, with the insurer's Tokyo branch offices on the sixth and seventh floors until 1963 and Takashimaya taking almost everything else.

Takahashi drew a further extension in 1937, but work stopped at the second basement level when the war with China broke out. It resumed only after 1945, and by then the architect was Murano Togo. His additions ran in two campaigns, 1951 to 1954 and 1961 to 1965, and they filled out the block to the shape it has now. Takashimaya's own account counts four stages of postwar extension across those years.

Why It Was Designated

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the building under the criterion of outstanding design. The reasoning turns on something unusual: the value lies not in the 1933 work alone but in how a second architect, a generation later and working in a completely different idiom, extended another man's building without either erasing it or pretending to copy it.

Takahashi's facade is organised in three horizontal bands. The first two floors are faced in granite, with square columns tied together by a cornice and enlivened by decorative balconies and corbels. The third through seventh floors carry tall openings divided into three lights each. Above them, two projecting cornices sandwich the top floor and hold down a mass roughly 65 metres wide and 30 metres high. The detail of the upper cornice follows European historical practice, and then departs from it: rafter ends appear where a European architect would have used none. That was Takahashi answering the competition brief in the only way it could honestly be answered.

Murano continued the arcade of semicircular arches along the eighth floor so the roofline reads as one. Everywhere else he stopped quoting. Glass block walls went up on the south and east elevations, and a sculptural rooftop tower took an elephant as its motif. Stand at the corner where 1933 meets 1954 and the transition is legible in a few seconds, which is exactly the point the designation makes: two designs in clear contrast, each dated by its own vocabulary, and still one building.

Takahashi Teitaro (1892 to 1970) also designed the Gakushi Kaikan of 1928, now a Registered Tangible Cultural Property, and the former Maeda family residence at Komaba of 1929, a Tokyo Metropolitan designated property. Murano Togo (1891 to 1984) is represented on the Important Cultural Property list by the Watanabe-o Memorial Hall in Ube of 1937 and the World Peace Memorial Cathedral in Hiroshima of 1954.

What to Look At, and How to Get In

The building is a working department store. Walk in through the main entrance on Chuo-dori during trading hours and most of the designated interior is simply there, no ticket required. The two-storey atrium behind that entrance is where Takahashi's interior survives best: columns rising the full height of both floors, marble on the column casings and on the exposed edge of the second floor slab, a coffered ceiling, and plaster carving on the corbels that support it. The marble was Italian, and in 1933 the building was reported to have the first whole-building heating and cooling system in Japan.

Look at the thickness of those columns and you are looking at a piece of engineering, not decoration. Ducts were run up inside casings wrapped around the columns to carry air from the basement plant to each floor. The columns came out fatter, but no floor needed a second, lower ceiling to hide ductwork, so the storey heights stayed generous. Marble also lines the walls of every elevator hall, still original, and the cars are still operated by hand by attendants.

The chandeliers that hung in the hall at opening were surrendered during the war under the metal requisition orders. Murano designed the replacements, taking his cue from the coffered ceiling above them rather than attempting a reproduction.

Two parts are harder to reach. The roof garden, which keeps its original elevator penthouse, circular pond, Japanese planting and a small hall dedicated to the Seven Lucky Gods, and the fifth-floor former reception room, whose plaster ceiling, timber panelling and washroom fittings survive. The former reception room now belongs to Takashimaya Archives Tokyo and opens only when a seminar is held there; the gallery on the fourth floor, open 10:30 to 19:30 and free of charge, is easier to catch. Takashimaya also runs a guided Important Cultural Property tour with a concierge, at the time of writing on the second Thursday of each month by reservation, with booking opening at 10:30 on the first day of the preceding month. Schedules change, so check the store's official page before travelling.

Access is straightforward. Exit B2 at Nihombashi Station on the Tokyo Metro Ginza and Tozai lines opens directly into the store's first basement, and Tokyo Station is a five-minute walk from the Yaesu side. A seismic retrofit completed in 2004 was carried out with the external appearance and interior character left intact, so what is visible now is close to what has been there all along.