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THEMING TAKING ROOT AT JAPANESE CENTERS

By Susan Thorne

Garden Walk, an open-air value retail mall outside Tokyo, features a floral theme, including 12-foot roses.

You could say that Garden Walk is a blooming success.

From its petal-shaped store roofs to a tulip fountain and sunflower-motif performance stage, the 160,000-square-foot, 56-store open-air value retail mall is abloom with a colorful flower motif, including 12-foot polymer roses in the Rose Court, where 6-foot plastic “thorns” play tunes such as “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

Garden Walk is one of the newest examples of shopping center theming in Japan, a design approach being used increasingly, often by North American architecture and design firms.

The urban garden experience continues with flower designs on pavement tiles, bright graphic blossoms on the mall exterior, and live flowers and dogwood trees throughout. This unusual design, plus fashionable retailers such as Hush Puppies, Columbia Sportswear and The Ginza Stockroom, have made Garden Walk a big hit since its October 2000 opening.

More than 4.5 million shoppers will have visited the center in the Makuhari district outside Tokyo by the end of its first year of operation.

Centers that have a theme or unusual design identity really stand out in the Japanese environment, according to George Wickwire, partner with Callison Architects, Seattle, who has worked in Japan for the past 10 years. “One of the reasons why themed environments are starting to pop up all over the place is that there’s a sameness about much Japanese retail architecture,” he said. “Retail is often squeezed into small spaces between other buildings downtown, or the buildings are monolithic and uninteresting. Theming gives a competitive edge.”

Competition for the customer is particularly intense in Japan, Wickwire said, and there is so much available retail that people often shop on the basis of convenience close to home or work. Consequently, larger retail venues must be noticeable if they are to have more than local market appeal. “You need to have something different and promote yourself,” Wickwire said.

Theming taps into the Japanese thirst for novelty in consumer products, said Scott Kilbourn, director of the Tokyo office of U.S. architectural firm RTKL, which developed the Garden Walk concept. “The pace of change in retail is very rapid — faster, I think, than in the U.S., and it’s a good market for new environments,” he said. “Our objective is to create a destination by having something totally new and unique.”

It’s not easy to carry out a themed concept in Japan. Most existing shopping complexes are based around multistoried department stores in urban sites; greenfield sites are difficult to assemble, and any land is so expensive that retail is often not the best use. Nonetheless, recent mall projects show that theming is playing a significant role. One landmark is the Mori Building Co.’s 125,000-square-meter (1.3 million-square-foot) enclosed mall called Venus Fort in Odaiba near Tokyo, which opened in August 1999. Billed as “a theme park for women,” Venus Fort features a European Renaissance street setting with a ceiling mural of clouds, and artificial sunlight that goes from “day” to “night” several times daily. Select restaurants and fashion retailers such as Polo Ralph Lauren, Jean Paul Gaultier and DKNY drew 1.8 million shoppers per month in the early days of the center’s operation. The themes of Venus Fort and Garden Walk have special appeal for female shoppers, whose share of household purchasing power in Japan is higher than in North America.

Another themed center, Rinku Premium Outlets, a 168,000-square-foot value retail center developed by Chelsea Japan Co. near Kansai and opened in November 2000, takes its design theme from the seaside port of Charleston, S.C., with features such as arcaded walkways fronting two floors of retail stores.

In addition to Garden Walk, RTKL has designed two other Western-themed outlet malls for Tokyo-based developer Mitsui Fudosan. Yokohama Bayside Marina, opened three years ago, re-creates a New England seaside village along the waterfront of the city of Yokohama.

La Fête Tama, opened last fall, is a two-level open-air center based around the story of a French family in a Provençal-style town, with the fictional characters providing the basis for themed retail zones. These shopping centers are very explicitly themed with a basis in fantasy or story lines; Kilbourn compares the approach to branding, and in the case of Yokohama Bayside, the brand is carried forward with center logos that are featured on merchandise such as beer labels, T-shirts and the mobile phone straps that many young Japanese people collect.

However, more subtle forms of theming are also being used in Japanese centers. An early example is Canal City Hakata, a mixed-use project opened in 1996 in Fukuoka by the Fukuoka Jisho Co., which combines 124 retail specialty shops with hotel and office space, a chapel and performing arts facilities. Retailers here include Japan’s first AMC multiplex (13 screens), Sega Joypolis, L.L. Bean, Timberland, Eddie Bauer and Laura Ashley, plus larger-format outlets of Mega Vandle (general merchandise) and MUJI (no-name quality goods). A unifying theme of the center is water: The center’s buildings are situated around a central courtyard with fountains and canals, which simulate the well-known canals and river of the adjacent city. There is also an astrological motif of sun, moon and stars that is repeated in everything from signage to floor and sidewalk paving patterns.

Another successful center with a strong sense of place is Mosaic Mall, developed by the Hankyu department store company near Yokohama in the mid-1990s. Mosaic is a neighborhood shopping center with around 120 stores emphasizing women’s fashion with a young focus; it connects with public transport and the surrounding streetscape, and includes a rooftop area overlooking the town with restaurants and an eight-story Ferris wheel.

Eddie Wang of The Jerde Partnership International, Venice, Calif., which created the design concept for Canal City, said his firm’s goal in theming is to create spaces that generate an unusual experience for visitors. Canal City consistently drew between 15 million and 17 million visitors annually in its first few years of operation and is showing staying power in the face of Japan’s protracted recession.

Retail sales have declined around 15% nationally year-over-year in 2001, yet Canal City’s sales have only slipped by 10%, Jerde data show, and 95% of visitors purchase something, compared with 45% of shoppers in Japanese shopping centers overall.

Jerde’s next themed design concept in Japan is being realized in a cinema/retail/entertainment project in downtown Kawasaki for owner/developer Kawasaki Misu, and it will be called Cinecittà, after the Italian filmmaking quarter of Rome. The 30-structure district, with 500,000 square feet of retail, will be located on a specially created artificial hill with streets meandering up and down it; Kawasaki itself is quite flat, so the new development will definitely stand out. Building materials and design features will contribute a European flavor, so that “the experience will be almost like a visit to an Italian hill town,” Wang said.

RTKL is now at work on Jazz Dream at Nagashima, a center in the city of Nagoya that focuses on the spirit and architecture of New Orleans. The value mall’s 20,640 square meters of gross leasable area (for 70 retail tenants and seven food-service operations) are attached to an amusement park that will feature a variety of traditional jazz music, from bebop to swing and gospel. An April 2002 opening is anticipated.

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