Selling the Modern: Japan’s Department Store Dreamworlds
By Susan Bowman, August 11, 2026
Every child who has begged to ride an escalator one more time understands the emotional logic at the center of art historian Nozomi Naoi's profusely illustrated new book, The Land of Happiness: How the Japanese Department Store Visualized Modern Life. When Tokyo's Mitsukoshi department store opened its new building in 1914, its escalator became an attraction, particularly for children. The book's title comes from literary scholar Ikeda Yasaburō's recollection of Mitsukoshi as a childhood "land of happiness," where the escalator itself produced excitement, rather than consumption of goods. Naoi's larger argument is that the department store helped produce modern culture as much as it reflected it. Through images, architecture, technology, and ritual, it established what modern life should look like, how citizens should behave, and who might participate in that identity. The Japanese department store manufactured an image of modern life, one poster, rooftop garden, and glass display case at a time. Customers entered not only to buy something, but to encounter a new way of seeing, moving, and behaving in public.
Building her case across three chapters, Naoi covers the period from the 1890s through the 1930s, when former kimono merchants were becoming Western-style retail institutions. These chapters, in tandem, examine Mitsukoshi's visual identity, the modern child and family, as well as the expansion of department-store culture into colonial territories, revealing how these institutions helped shape Japan's modernity.
Centered on Mitsukoshi and its longtime designer Sugiura Hisui, the first chapter is the strongest and most visually compelling. Hisui was born in Matsuyama in 1876, trained in Japanese-style painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, and worked in printing and newspapers before joining Mitsukoshi in 1908, bringing a refined artistic sensibility to commercial design. He drew from Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and other European movements, but Naoi presents his work as more than stylistic borrowing. Hisui adapted these visual languages to communicate a particular idea of modern Japanese life. In his posters, magazine covers, and promotional materials, Western aesthetics and Japanese identity combine to create a persuasive image of contemporary elegance.
To readers interested in graphic design, Naoi's book will be especially valuable. Design, in Naoi's telling, has a role in producing culture, not simply reflecting it after the fact. Mitsukoshi's visual language made a particular version of modern life appear coherent, familiar, and eventually natural as it was repeated across posters, publications, displays, and interiors. Its posters announced products and its magazines documented the store. Together with packaging, window displays, interiors, and architecture, they formed a coherent identity customers could recognize, enter, and temporarily inhabit. Customers did not simply arrive with fully formed tastes. Mitsukoshi organized, demonstrated, and cultivated them.
Mitsukoshi employed academy-trained artists to produce advertisements, packaging, displays, and publications. Hisui argued that the poster as a medium had its own constraints: it needed to attract attention and communicate amid the distractions of urban life. One of Naoi's most important contributions is showing that commercial design carried its own weight within modern Japanese culture, providing a place where a new visual language could develop and reach a broad public.
Mitsukoshi's engagement with Western dress, graphic styles, and architectural forms aligned the store with a cosmopolitan, forward-looking world, while its careful adaptation made global modernity feel distinctly Japanese.
The architecture and interior design of the building did comparable work. Marble columns, stained glass, dramatic staircases, electric illumination, elevators, and escalators communicated progress before customers ever reached the sales floor. Technology became a form of spectacle, persuading the customer as much as any salesperson. Customers felt free to wander, but their experience had already been shaped through architecture, signage, display, and the choreography of service.
The second chapter turns to the image of the modern child and family. In Mitsukoshi's advertisements and publications, children appeared as treasured members of an emerging middle-class family and, not incidentally, as future customers and citizens. The store offered clothing, toys, educational materials, and expert advice on health and childcare, and with them ideas about responsible parenthood, good taste, and the properly cultivated child.
While we learn a great deal about the ideal customers Mitsukoshi dreamed up, there is comparatively little about the clerks, service workers, female employees, and young boys whose labor sustained its polished surfaces. The store's visual order depended on making some kinds of work visible and allowing others to disappear. As the store’s culture comes into sharper focus, so too do the absences surrounding it: who was trained to maintain its standards of service, how workers were taught to behave within it, and why so many never appeared in its carefully constructed image of modern life.
Following Japanese department stores into Korea, China, and Taiwan, the final chapter makes clear that the visual language of consumer modernity is difficult to separate from Japan's vision of empire. Stores, advertisements, and commercial objects carried Japanese cultural authority into territories acquired through military aggression. Fashionable women, exotic commodities, ships, and tropical plants all helped make colonial possession look attractive, natural, and even modern.
The Land of Happiness is written for readers already interested in graphic design, art history, or Japanese visual culture; this is not a breezy cultural history. The prose can become crowded with names and dates. Still, Naoi offers a compelling reminder that design rarely arrives in isolation. It is produced through institutions, commerce, architecture, and spectacle, each shaping the way culture is encountered long before an object is ever brought home.