What Mitsukoshi is known for

Nihombashi Mitsukoshi in Tokyo spreads its departments across a main building and an adjoining building. Clothing and accessories share the store with household goods as well as jewellery or art. Food and confectionery occupy lower floors, giving shoppers a different stopping point from the fashion departments above.

Mitsukoshi descends from Echigoya, the Nihonbashi kimono house founded in 1673 whose innovations — fixed prices, cash sales, cloth cut to customer need — anticipated modern retail by two centuries; the Mitsui family enterprise it began became both Japan's first department store, by its own 1904 declaration, and the seed of one of its great business houses. The Nihonbashi flagship, guarded by bronze lions modeled on Trafalgar Square's and centered on a soaring statue of the goddess Magokoro, is a designated Important Cultural Property where white-gloved elevator attendants and the morning opening ceremony preserve department-store ritual at its most formal. The basement food halls and the upper craft floors — kimono, lacquer, ceramics — carry the store's three-and-a-half centuries directly. Arrive for opening to see the bows; visit the craft floors for gifts with genuine lineage.

Time the visit for the ten o'clock opening bows at least once, and take the craft floors slowly — the kimono and lacquer departments are museums that sell.