I’m not generally a fan of department stores. They’re proliferating in Tokyo, knocking down local history and flavor to replace it with big-box sameness.
I’ll make an exception, however, for a department store that bears its own distinct history and style. Mitsukoshi, in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi neighborhood, fits this bill. Mitsukoshi is more than just a snapshot of Meiji-era modernization. It’s also the home of an 11-meter-tall unnamed goddess who looks out kindly over shoppers as they peruse necklaces and facial cream.
Just who (or what) is this figure? And who’s the beautiful madman who created her?
An unnamed goddess carved from a 500-year-old tree
Mitsukoshi’s history dates back far before the Meiji period. The iconic shopping mall began in 1673 as Echigoya (越後屋), a dry-goods store opened in Edo’s Nihonbashi by the merchant Mitsui Takatoshi (三井高利). Its big innovation? It sold everything at fixed prices, doing away with haggling. It also cut cloth to order rather than selling it by the bolt. For the first time, Echigoya made fashion accessible to the common person.
Echigoya would grow from these humble beginnings to become the Mitsui banking and real estate empire. In 1904, the company reorganized as Mitsukoshi Gofukuten and sent customers its “Department Store Declaration.” From that year on, the newly-christened Mitsukoshi would be a department store on the American and European model. It was the first (but hardly the last) Western department store in Japan.
The declaration fit the times. After the fall of the shogunate, Japan embarked on a rapid push for modernization modeled largely after Western norms. Neighboring Ginza would become the economic centerpiece of this push, serving as the home of the metropolis’ newspapers and modern cafes.
Goddess, delayed
Mitsukoshi opened its flagship Nihonbashi store on September 15, 1914. It announced luxury through architecture: a five-story central hall ringed by Corinthian marble columns under a skylight.
46 years later, this atrium would become the home of the goddess who overlooks it today. Mitsukoshi commissioned it from woodcarver Satō Gengen (佐藤玄々) in 1951, giving him two years to finish it.
Born into a family of shrine carvers in Fukushima, Satō came to Tokyo in 1906 to study under the woodcarver Yamazaki Chōun. He joined the revived Japan Art Institute’s sculpture section and had his first major show in 1914. He studied under Antoine Bourdelle, a former assistant to Rodin, in France from 1922 to 1924 under a government scholarship.
Satō would go on to join the Imperial Art Academy and the Japan Art Academy. His bronze statue of Wake no Kiyomaro (和気清麻呂像, 1940) stands near the Imperial Palace moat by Takebashi.
The statue was intended to commemorate the department store’s 50th anniversary in 1954, and serve as a symbol of the store’s philosophy of magokoro (真心), or sincerity. Satō, however, wouldn’t complete the project until 1960. By then, the cost had ballooned to somewhere between hundreds of thousands to the low millions USD.
The project was an expensive labor of love. Satō worked on it in a dedicated studio in Myōshin-ji in Kyoto, working slowly through concepts, designs, and trial carvings. The project ultimately consumed over 100,000 craftsperson-days of time to complete.
Who is she?
Carved from a single 500-year-old block of wood, the goddess is stunning in both detail and scale. She’s as elegant and awe-inspiring as she is mysterious.
For his part, the enigmatic artist didn’t deign to explain his work. At her unveiling, Satō Gengen rose to the podium, said, “I am Satō,” and promptly sat back down.
In broader terms, the statue represents a tennyo (天女), a class of goddesses inhabiting the highest of the six realms of Buddhism, the tennin (天人), or Realm of Heavenly Beings. These figures aren’t permanent; in Buddhism, even the heavenly beings age and die. Their realm, while at the top of creation, is still subject to the samsaric wheel of life and death.
Many visitors assume the statue represents Kannon (観音), the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion. In fact, she doesn’t represent any specific goddess. Neither Satō nor Mitsukoshi ever gave her a firm identity. Her status as a tennyo makes her more akin to Kichijōten (吉祥天, goddess of fortune and beauty, descended from the Indian Lakshmi) or Gigeiten (伎芸天, goddess of the arts).
From Mitsukoshi’s standpoint, the figure represents sincerity. The store glosses it as 大和心 (Yamato-gokoro), the native Japanese spirit. Her “backstory,” in Mitsukoshi’s view, is corporate and philosophical, not mythological.
Satō was aiming, however, for something higher. His teacher Antoine Bourdelle reportedly sent him home from France with a singular charge: “With your own blood, create the soul of your homeland.”
What Satō carved is an instant rather than a named goddess’s tale. It depicts a heavenly maiden wrapped in auspicious clouds (瑞雲, zuiun) at the moment she alights on the pistil of a flower, with 48 birds worked into the clouds behind her. It’s Satō’s attempt at reviving mythological sculpture in the modern, postwar era.
Serious “Final Boss” energy
The lack of a definitive mythology means that the statue has become a vessel for people’s hopes and desires. During the COVID-19 pandemic, staffers at Mitsukoshi reported people coming to pray for a swift end to the pandemic. (Well done, Holy Mother.)
She’s also had her moments of virality in the Internet age. In 2021, gamers stood in awe of her “final boss” energy, likening her to the god-like beings one fights at the end of popular games such as Final Fantasy or Bayonetta.
The goddess isn’t the only vaunted figure at Mitsukoshi, either. The pair of bronze lions installed at the entrance in 1914 were modeled on the lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square.
They became a Tokyo landmark and a favorite meeting spot, and they carry a piece of folklore of their own. Straddle a lion’s back without anyone seeing you, the saying goes, and your wish will come true. The lions are very popular at exam time, when students hope a little light tomfoolery will offset their lack of test prep. (Tourists: please don’t get any ideas.)
It might seem silly to some to pray to a department store goddess. Maybe it is. But I find a strange sort of solace in knowing that, even in the age of AI, a monument to sincerity can still inspire devotion.
Keep reading
Sources
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