2023 | 9 min read
The Tsutaya in front of Shibuya Station is where you came to get a cinematic education. In the age of streaming, where else were you going to find the entire back catalogue of Aki Kaurismaki on DVD, the films of Powell and Pressburger with Japanese subtitles, deep cuts from the director’s chair of Nagisa Ōshima? If Tsutaya didn’t have it, it probably never got made.
Tsutaya let you rent four or more back-catalogue DVDs for 110 yen each and keep them for a week. This takes me back to a period of gainful underemployment – I won’t say which one – when I made it my business to watch 100 classic films and ranked them all in a spreadsheet from best (take a bow, Vertigo, Ikiru and Straw Dogs) to most tedious or laughably bad (sorry, Lust for Life, 8½ and House of Bamboo.)
Other pleasures could be had completely free. At Tsutaya, you got to wander through an alternative universe of film titles. I’d love to eavesdrop on the discussions that led Woody Allen’s Small-Time Crooks to be renamed Oishii Seikatsu (Delicious Living? The Good Life?) and I can only assume they centred on the lack of positive criminal role models in Japan. But I’ll leave it to future Wes Anderson scholars to ponder how Rushmore became Tensai Makksu no Sekai (The World of Max the Genius). It feels somehow worth knowing that David Lynch’s Dune is called Suna no Wakusei (The Sand Planet). Is that because the title Sakkyu (Dune) had already been taken by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point?
But the selection always went deeper than obvious cuts from big-name directors. More recently, riding a wave of Showa nostalgia, Tsutaya added 6000 obscure titles only ever released on VHS. Together, these tapes form a curious library of the fiercely occult, the clearly depraved, the merely stoned, and a lot of dubious sex comedies. Tsutaya will even rent you a VHS player if you ever decide that this rabbit hole is for you.
Tsutaya occupies all ten floors of the landmark QFront Building overlooking Shibuya’s scramble crossing. Opened in December 1999, Shibuya Tsutaya was the chain’s flagship store, one that popped the cork on two decades of nationwide expansion. In a move that feels a long time coming, Tsutaya will finally put a stop to its rentals business in Shibuya next month. Three entire floors of DVDs, Blu-rays, VHS tapes and CDs will disappear, to be replaced next year by more cafe seating and a members-only relaxation space.
It all feels inevitable given the transformation of downtown Shibuya from a nerve centre of cultural consumption to the most heavily touristed place in Japan. Tourists can be a wonderful source of income in so many ways, but renting DVDs is just not on their bucket list. Most people who travel on Tsutaya’s escalators today are only looking to borrow one thing: Bathroom, a highly anticipated release that can be found on the fifth floor if you’re a woman and the fourth floor if you’re a man. If this was your first visit to she-BOO-ya, you probably wouldn’t even know it as tsoo-TA-ya. It was just another video store at the crossroads of the world.
People’s media habits had also changed. With the entry of Netflix in 2015, streaming had finally caught up with Japan. For a while, Tsutaya kept partying like it was 1999. And we should all be grateful it did. Physical media is something worth holding onto because streaming services are, with a few niche exceptions, poor custodians of cinematic history. The streaming model is FOMO-driven, always chasing the next big thing. It isn’t designed to serve the, optimistically speaking, five to ten people each week who might want to sit through Fellini’s 8½.
That Shibuya Tsutaya stayed in business as long as it did speaks of its symbolic importance to the company, not to mention that it served as a useful front for another kind of business altogether. The truth is, even before streaming took off, Tsutaya had already moved on to something else. Something that sounds frankly rubbish in translation but happens to encapsulate what most Japanese companies (once they reach a certain level of maturity) regard as their primary social role: lifestyle suggestion.
The first Tsutaya store opened in Osaka in 1983. It transformed the seedy image of video rentals by introducing books and records to the mix, becoming a kind of lifestyle information centre that connected customers to a wider world of culture and consumption. Massively and instantly popular, Tsutaya began expanding at the rate of 100 stores a year, most of them franchises, and formed a planning company called Culture Convenience Club (CCC) to oversee its management and growth.
From the outside, Tsutaya looked like a bookstore. But the books and magazines weren’t necessarily the product: they were drivers of cultural demand. Offering movies, music and books under one roof was a novel idea for its time, but also a very Japanese one. Believe it or not, it’s actually very Western to group things into vertical categories according to formal characteristics. Japan has always seemed more attuned to horizontal grouping: connecting things that belong in different categories but might be considered similar in the ways they are used or in who uses them. Tsutaya was neither a bookstore nor a video store, but a business that rented and sold “packaged culture” or physical media.
Lateral or horizontal thinking is hardly unique to Japan – anyone can grasp the concept of physical media – but it seems to come faster and more easily to people here. Vertical thinking, as in Sight and Sound’s Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time list, often creates unease. It’s too definitive, too sequential, too final. Rather than best in one category, it’s better to be widely acclaimed as good. And even that may change when the question is added: “good for whom?” Exemplary goodness will necessarily vary for different types of people and may stretch to encompass not only the movies, music and books but also the sweets, furniture and even neighbourhoods most becoming of a captivating city gal, enterprising man-who-can, or mellowing affluent uncle.
Tsutaya was always in the business of helping to define “good”. But while lifestyle manuals and select shops, from Brutus to Beams, relied on a cast of individual tastemakers, Tsutaya always put customer data first. It had the advantage of being a membership business from its inception. In the early 2000s, as demand for physical media began to slow, Tsutaya doubled down on data with its T-Point rewards programme and made customer insights its core business and engine of growth. It used that data to open T-Site stores tailored to different neighbourhoods, while also repackaging it as consumer trend reports for paying clients.
The T-Point card was especially popular with Japan’s highly fragmented supermarket sector, which otherwise found it difficult to acquire customer data at scale. The deal was that you handed over your purchase data to Tsutaya and got to use those lovely T-Points to rent movies and music in exchange. One more reason to keep a flagging rentals business going. And the card renewed annually so Tsutaya always knew where you lived. At some point in the 2010s, if you purchased a certain brand of black-pepper camembert cheese, Tsutaya probably knew your price ceiling for wine and which Bill Evans album you would enjoy most.
It’s impossible to talk about Tsutaya for any length of time and not draw comparisons with Netflix. Both companies started out in the movie rentals business and both lean heavily on data to give customers more of what they might like. The obvious difference is that one is a typical online disrupter, while the other is fighting a rearguard action for physical stuff – but doesn’t seem to mind too much if you go off and purchase that stuff online.
But another difference hints at the opposing worldviews of American (or at least Silicon Valley) capitalism and its Japanese counterpart. Netflix pursues a reductive endgame in which it finally monopolises all attention. Its CEO once even said, half-jokingly, that Netflix considers sleep to be its main competitor, a quote that continues to follow him around because it sounds quite plausible. For Tsutaya, there is no endgame. It has an additive strategy of endlessly proposing new lifestyles to its customers. Like most Japanese companies, it aims not to increase shareholder value but to be a beloved company that can exist for a long time.
In 2011, Tsutaya’s parent company CCC secured a massive loan, bought out its own shareholders, and delisted from the Tokyo stock exchange. In the same year, it opened a new flagship store in Daikanyama, called T-Site, that would certainly scare the pants off most investors. More than a decade later, T-Site still feels like something beamed from the future. The books and magazines are only nominally for sale, and the staff will always look slightly surprised if you decide to leave with one. At T-Site, books become tools of suggestion that create demand for new lifestyles.
I know there are people who have difficulty pronouncing “lifestyle” without a certain wrinkling of the nose. From lifestyle brand to lifestyle publication, the word itself is a pejorative sneer. Lifestyles are for those who lack originality, people who let others decide. But Japanese commerce, as well as showing a genius for lateral thinking, values quality over originality. Having an expert eye for what’s good in many categories, from stationery to coffee grinders, is preferable to displaying idiosyncratic tastes. Or worse, not caring at all. And 40 million people can’t easily co-exist in the same urban area unless they agree on a lot of things. Sometimes I think my own story in Japan could be subtitled: how I learned to love a good lifestyle.
As for which lifestyle, Tsutaya refuses to call itself a tastemaker. It creates the spaces, increasingly retail destinations, where customers discover things for themselves. The T-Site business model is opaque, but it’s safe to assume that Tsutaya has shifted from a model in which customers rented action-comedies to one in which brands can finally rent customers. Meanwhile, a clever judo throw against the might of ecommerce has been its strategy of presenting shoppers with fewer but better options.
This is easier to grasp at Tsutaya Electrics, a more spacious retail offering that opened in Futako-Tamagawa in 2015. Here, books and magazines nod you gently in the direction of high-end kitchen, outdoor and audio equipment. Like the Daikanyama store, which pioneered pet-friendly, browse-with-coffee, zero-pressure-to-buy retail in Japan, the Futako-Tamagawa store is based on customer data gathered from the surrounding area: affluent, suburban Setagaya in the west of Tokyo, where people are more likely to have large kitchen counters and might even have room for a canoe.
And so it feels appropriate that Shibuya Tsutaya, when it reopens next year, will be a space to rest and recuperate from relentless urban surfaces. We don’t know what that space will look like, but expect lots of mahogany and brass, low lighting and serif typefaces. That doesn’t sound very Shibuya, but one key insight for Tsutaya is that young people long to experience adult culture. This time though, the customers will be more challenging. Many of them will be transient, multilingual owners of zero T-Points. Get them into a recovery pod and let the lifestyle whispering begin. First Tsutaya came for your shopping basket, next it might be coming for your mind.
Next: Sweetness Depends