I don't know how long ago, cultural coffee bookstores attracted more and more people's attention and sought after. Bookstores of all sizes began to enter shopping centers and spread all over the streets. It seems that Chinese people fell in love with reading overnight. The opening of Eslite Bookstore in Suzhou and Eslite Life in Shenzhen attracted much attention and became "places of pilgrimage for literary youth" for a while.

Suzhou Chengpin Bookstore, the first flagship store in mainland China.

Shenzhen Vientiane Tiandi Eslite Life

The popularity of cultural bookstores has been endowed with various fashionable concepts such as "new retail", "new species", "consumption upgrade", "small trend" and "small happiness" by various media giants, cultural scholars and observers. I have always had instinctive doubts about these metaphysical and fashionable concepts, and I always feel that they are just tools to brush traffic from the media and network writers, rather than the essence of things. Instead of pursuing hot spots, I prefer to calm down and study in depth and dig out the story behind it after the wind clears.

as the "most beautiful bookstore in the world", the daikanyama Tomoya Bookstore has been screened, which is highly sought after by people. Its success has naturally become the object of study for many business operators, designers and cultural scholars.

successful people often take success for granted when they review the past. Ever since, we have heard Ma Yun say that "the most regrettable thing in life is the establishment of Alibaba", and the best-selling book of success is also the same logic: assume that you are a successful person to write the so-called "success truth". If you believe it, it is no different from being brainwashed by pyramid schemes. And I think the house bookstore, from the ordinary, has become great.

Tomoya Bookstore was born in Meifang City with a population of only 41,111.

Tomoya Bookstore and the founder of CCC Group, Tomoya Tsusho

The first Tomoya Bookstore was born in Meifang City, the hometown of founder Tomoya Tsusho, in March of 1983, but in 1982, a year ago, the record rental store LOFT opened on the fifth floor of an old department store at the north exit of Meifang Station. LOFT is the predecessor of Tomoya Bookstore, and it would be without LOFT.

The department store in front of Meifang Station, where the predecessor of Tomoya Bookstore was located

In fact, ‘LOFT was founded only because Masuda Zongzhao found that it was very popular and profitable to open a record rental store in the city next door, but Meifang City did not. As for why the record rental store should be combined with the catering, it was because the empty shop on the fifth floor of the department store could only be rented to the catering store (because the fifth floor was the catering business floor), and Masuda Zongzhao finally decided to combine the catering with the recording rental, which was also a helpless move, rather than an intentional "cross-border". At that time, the catering was "DELHI", an Indian curry coffee shop in Tokyo, which was taken care of by Masuda's mother and sister.

Masuda's mother (left) and sister (right)

After the success of LOFT, a record rental and catering store, Masuda was worried that if a larger store opened on the 1 th floor on the other side of the station, most customers of LOFT would be taken away, and at this time he was in debt. So he decided to open a bookstore and record rental shop near the station, because there was no bookstore open until late at night in Meifang City. In this way, the first real house bookstore opened in LOFT one year later.

The first TSUTAYA BOOK store

When I went to Japan, I visited the store. The location was very off-center. Strictly speaking, it was not a city. It was a small town at most in China. At that time, I was still suspicious. Is this the place where the "most beautiful bookstore in the world" made its fortune? It's amazing. Greatness always comes from the ordinary, and it's not so eye-catching. There aren't so many flowers applauding, and there aren't so many tall concepts.

The daikanyama store, which opened in 2111, really made Tomoya Bookstore famous at home and abroad. Different from being sought after by young artists, daikanyama Shuwu Bookstore was originally designed for the elderly. Now is the Internet age. Many social relationships of the post-91s and post-91s generation are constructed online, but there are no familiar friends when they come to physical bookstores. However, Japan's aging is extremely serious, and its population structure presents an "inverted triangle" model.

At present, there is a large number of elderly people aged 61 to 71 in Japan, who were born in the post-war era and have the highest birth rate in Japan. By the 1971 s and 1981 s, they were just 31-35 years old, in the golden age of their lives, and the 71 s and 81 s were also the most prosperous period of Japan's economy. Now these people are still the mainstay of society, with a large amount of savings and high spending power. It is this generation that has been growing with the bookstore for more than 31 years, but they are relatively slow to the emerging Internet. Therefore, Masuda decided to build a bookstore for the elderly in daikanyama.

The planning and design of daikanyama Store is all about the concerns of the elderly. Until now, the name of the bookstore has always been expressed in English as TSUTAYA BOOK. Because Japanese elderly people use more Chinese characters, Kenya Hara, a master designer, was specially invited to design a new Chinese-character shop name "Tomoya Bookstore".

The name of the Chinese character shop in the Sakaya Bookstore designed by Kenya Hara

In addition, the theme of "health preservation" is deeply excavated in the book selection, and the most complete cooking (medical and food homology) book area in Japan is created. Considering that the elderly care more about the problem of "death" than the living method, special areas are set up for books such as religion, philosophy and biographies about different living methods.

Old people like to get up early, and they advance the opening hours of bookstores and cafes to 7 o'clock. In order to alleviate the loneliness of the elderly, pet shops with pet hospitals are specially introduced.

in addition, in order to take care of the elderly with inconvenient legs and feet, Motovelo, a specialty store selling electric power-assisted bicycles, was built. In order to facilitate elderly customers to buy gifts for their children and grandchildren, foreign environmental protection toy stores have also been introduced.

electric bicycle specialty store motovelo

Tomoya Bookstore also pays special attention to the integration with the surrounding environment: there are many embassies near daikanyama, where foreigners are concentrated, and all the words in the store are specially expressed in Japanese, English and Chinese. There are also many creative studios near daikanyama, which set up used book salons for magazines, books, movies and other archival materials needed for creative work. For the convenience of creative workers, the closing time was extended to 2 am, and they were allowed to bring books to Starbucks to study and work at the same time. To this end, a theme restaurant is also opened to facilitate creative exchange.

Let's end with a sentence from Tommasuda: Our goal is not to create "the first time in the world", but to realize "customer value".

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