FMCG History | うらぶくろ, Hiroshima — The Warehouse Shop That Opened at Six in the Morning

By six in the morning on 2 June 1984, a queue was standing on a Hiroshima back street where hardly anyone shopped.

It was waiting for a shop called Unique Clothing Warehouse, opened by Ogori Shoji (小郡商事), a men's-tailoring firm from Ube in Yamaguchi that had been selling suits since 1949.

Tadashi Yanai (柳井正), running the family business, had wanted a unit on Hondori, the covered arcade that is the busiest shopping street in the Chugoku and Shikoku regions.

He could not afford one. So he took a lease a block south, on the two narrow lanes locals call うらぶくろ, the back of Fukuromachi.

When the traders on those lanes organised a revitalisation committee in 2007, they put their own footfall at a tenth of Hondori's, and in 1984 the lanes carried fewer shops than they do now.

Staff came up from Ube for weeks beforehand to hand out flyers outside nearby schools.

The crowd that produced was large enough that Yanai went on a radio broadcast that morning asking people not to come, and he told the Chugoku Shimbun thirty years later that it had felt like striking a seam of gold.

The name was the business plan. Racks open, stock stacked like a warehouse, and none of the attentive sales assistants who were then standard in a Japanese clothing shop.

That shop closed in August 1991, by Fast Retailing's own reckoning. The company dropped the Ogori Shoji name the following month.

UNIQLO is a contraction of the shop's name, and a widely repeated story holds that the Q replaced the C through a clerical error at a Hong Kong registration in 1988 — a story Fast Retailing's published corporate history does not tell, and which no primary document confirmed here.

Nothing marks the site.

The pin sits on the うらぶくろ lane where the shop stood; the company has never published the street number, and the accounts naming a particular unit are local memory rather than record.

The cover photograph shows one of those Fukuromachi back streets at dusk, under the sign for the Fukuromachi Elementary School bicycle park that locals still use when giving directions into うらぶくろ.

The second photograph is the Hondori arcade at night, thick with the crowds that Yanai wanted and could not pay for.

Photos: warabi hatogaya, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.