Kuchikomi Mar. 08, 2009 - 05:00AM JST ( 15 )

Big swallows little—that’s the law of deregulated capitalism. Declining sales force store closures—that’s the law of economic crashes like the present one. How do these forces play out for ordinary Japanese shoppers in small cities among an aging population? Weekly Playboy (March 16) has a look, producing what it whimsically calls “a chill-wind report on a recession-bound archipelago.”

It’s a bad time for supermarkets. Sixty will close nationwide within three years. Moreover Aeon, the giant supermarket chain and shopping mall developers, has canceled or postponed construction of seven malls nationwide, the Nikkei Shimbun reported in February.

One canceled mall was to have been built in Kasama City, Ibaraki Prefecture. “We had such high expectations,” laments a local municipal official to Weekly Playboy. “It was to have opened in April 2011, creating 3,500 jobs and generating 200 million yen in tax revenue.”

Aeon looms large in the magazine’s “chill-wind” scenario. Both in failing to build where it was expected to, and in setting up on a scale massive enough to choke local competitors—which sometimes are Aeon subsidiaries—it provides a clear demonstration of the impact, positive and negative, of mega-business on its surroundings.

The city of Kaizuka in Osaka Prefecture welcomed a Jusco supermarket outlet in 1987. Last August, Jusco closed down. This was a local shock—the store had been popular, and had done a thriving business. What went wrong? In a word, a new large-scale shopping mall put up by Aeon, Jusco’s parent company. Traffic drained away from Jusco to the mall, 10 minutes away by car. Jusco withered.

There was more to this than one store going out of business. There were, first of all, Jusco’s various tenant—35 altogether—that did business in rented space within the Jusco premises. When Aeon first announced the closure plan in February 2008, 33 of the tenants left quietly. Two—a meat vendor and a fish vendor—rebelled. They set up loudspeakers and made speeches; they mounted a signature campaign; they scuffled with Aeon executives who came by to put a stop to these activities. It was tense for a time—not that the outcome was ever in doubt.

As for the people in the neighborhood, they seethe in vain—so far, at least. “We bought this condominium the year Jusco opened. We took it precisely because Jusco was right next door!” fumes a housewife in her 60s. “The real estate agent emphasized it as a big advantage. I’m getting on in years, my legs are bad, I can’t ride a bicycle any more. Jusco was the only shop within walking distance. I’m seriously thinking of suing.”

Much the same thing happened on the tiny island of Innoshima, population 26,000, in the Inland Sea between Honshu and Shikoku. There the beloved supermarket that died was Saty. Originally owned by Mycal, it operated on contracts renewed every three years. When Mycal went bankrupt eight years ago, Aeon took Saty over, reducing the three-year contract to one year and finally shutting it down altogether when sales fell to one-third what they had once been.

“There’s nowhere else to shop around here,” says a housewife in her 60s. “Once a week, I have to get my son to drive me out to a store in the suburbs.”

Worse still, says Weekly Playboy, a row of small shops that had thrived on Saty’s presence among them—people would go to Saty for groceries, then to the shops for clothes and various daily items—is now in sad decline. “Sales are half what they were in when Saty was here,” says the operator of a stationery store.