Pat's Blog

Ask any young Japanese person 20 or so what their 3 favorite activities are and ‘shopping’ will almost certainly be one. If not number one... Who knows, maybe 1,2 &3? And it’s the nature of shopping that this article is about, as it’s changing so rapidly from just a decade or so ago.


The long, covered shopping arcades so uniqe to most Japanese cities are in trouble. Some in really big trouble as people’s shopping patterns have changed and so have the ‘shotengais’ in recent years.



I remember years ago, people would train in from places like Sakaide and Marugame for a day’s shopping in Takamatsu. People now seem to prefer the out-of-town shopping malls and these malls are springing up in the countryside, sometimes with a Warner Mycal theater as a further incentive to make a day of it in a mall.


To find out more, I interviewed one arcade shopkeeper and there was a certain weight in his voice as he looked into the distance and said; “s-a-a-a-a-a-a.” His wife looked at her shoes, said nothing then shuffled off glumly.

S-a-a-a-a isn’t really a word but a long exhalation used when answers to problems just aren’t there. Collectively, as retailers, they’ve tried to bring people back to the arcades by implanting people themselves in them, which is a pretty smart idea. That is to say building apartment complexes right in the middle of the old arcades in the hope that there will be some life brought back to the inner city’s CBDs.



This is hardly just a Japanese phenomenon as CBDs in many of the world’s cities struggle to evolve and change with the fickle nature of shoppers and shopping trends. Many foreigners living here I know do a thing called ‘a Costco Run’. Costco is a major discount store in the Kobe area and ridiculously cheap. So much so, one can go broke saving money buying up so much ‘cheap stuff’. Walking in to one of these giant no-frills warehouses is bare-bones shopping and I’ve left with arms full of some pretty useless stuff just because it was ‘cheap’. So how can the shopping arcades possibly compete?


The future of the shopping malls lies in creativity I think. In other Japanese cities, university students along with savvy business entrepreneurs are being asked to create think tanks to come up with ways to attract customers back.



Some of the older arcades (see photo of Marugame city arcade taken on a busy Saturday) now resemble ghost towns and that’s precisely what worries the Takamatsu arcade retailers.

photo:Marugame city arcade


We wish them luck as trends and fashion cycles do come and go. So it may well be with people once again attracted back to the shopping arcades through creative new projects like the beautiful glass dome area in the Hyogo machi - Marugame Machi forum area. This is a revamped arcade and a great space for concerts and evening events. It’s really quite beautiful. I’ll be writing more about this area and some of the more unusual coffee shops in town soon.