is a

department store A department store is a retail establishment offering a wide range of consumer goods in different areas of the store, each area ("department") specializing in a product category. In modern major cities, the department store made a dramatic app ...

Shibuya, Tokyo Shibuya (渋谷区 ''Shibuya-ku'') is a special ward in Tokyo, Japan. As a major commercial and finance center, it houses two of the busiest railway stations in the world, Shinjuku Station (southern half) and Shibuya Station. As of April 1, ...

, Japan. The store is operated by SHIBUYA109 Entertainment Corporation, a subsidiary of the

Tokyu Group The is a railway keiretsu whose parent company is the Tokyu Corporation railway company, which links Tokyo and its suburbs. Many companies in the group are designed to enhance the value of the Tokyu rail network. In addition to the railroad syst ...

History and description

The building, located just across the street from

Shibuya Station is a railway station in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, operated jointly by East Japan Railway Company (JR East), Keio Corporation, Tokyu Corporation, and Tokyo Metro. With 2.4 million passengers on an average weekday in 2004, it is the fourth-busiest c ...

, opened in April 1979. The architect was Minoru Takeyama. Tokyu, the building's operator, designed the building as a "Fashion Community" containing small retail stores targeting the early-30s female consumer. Tokyu intended the store to compete with

Seibu Department Stores is a Japanese department store. The first store to trade under the name opened its doors in 1949. Seibu is typical of Japanese department stores with a wide variety of stores doing business on several floors. The company is now a subsidiary of S ...

, which was making inroads into the Shibuya area.Bull, Brett, "Decades as Tokyo's tower of girl power", ''

Japan Times ''The Japan Times'' is Japan's largest and oldest English-language daily newspaper. It is published by , a subsidiary of News2u Holdings, Inc.. It is headquartered in the in Kioicho, Chiyoda, Tokyo. History ''The Japan Times'' was launched by ...

'', January 22, 2009, p. 17. The name of the building, ''109'', is a form of word play (

goroawase Japanese wordplay relies on the nuances of the Japanese language and Japanese script for humorous effect. Double entendres have a rich history in Japanese entertainment (such as in kakekotoba) due to the language's large number of homographs (d ...

, specifically numerical substitution) and is taken from the Japanese characters ''tō'' (meaning 10) and ''kyū'' (9) as in ''Tōkyū''. The interior of the building is designed to move shoppers in a loop on each floor from the elevators past various shops. A movie theater was originally planned for the top floor, but the fire department would not grant approval due to emergency-evacuation routes not meeting appropriate standards. Although originally targeted at women in their 30s, the building later became more known as a sanctuary for young women from the ''

gyaru ( ja, ギャル) , is a Japanese fashion subculture. The term ''gyaru'' is a Japanese transliteration of the English slang word . The term for was introduced in Japan by the American jeans company ''Lee'', who introduced a new line of je ...

'' subculture. The original

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...

set from

SoftBank Mobile is a Japanese multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo which focuses on investment management. The Group primarily invests in companies operating in technology, energy, and financial sectors. It also runs the ...

(as used by

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

prior to the Unicode emoji standardisation) included one for Shibuya 109, . As a corporate icon, it was not assigned a standard

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

code point, but it continues to be supported by

Twemoji The implementation of emojis on different platforms took place across a three-decade period, starting in the 1990s. Today, the exact appearance of emoji is not prescribed but can vary between fonts and platforms, much like different typefaces. ...

at its location in SoftBank's

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...

. Due to its prominent location in Shibuya, the building appears in various Japanese media like anime and video games; however, since 109 is a copyrighted brand, the number is always altered.

Stores

* Shibuya 109 (Shibuya, Tokyo) - April 1979 * MAGNET by Shibuya 109 (Shibuya, Tokyo) - April 2018 Opened as 109-2 in April 1979, renamed to 109Men's in March 2011 before being renamed once again to its current name. * Kohrinbo 109 (

Kanazawa, Ishikawa is the capital Cities of Japan, city of Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 466,029 in 203,271 households, and a population density of 990 persons per km2. The total area of the city was . Overview Cityscape ...

) - September 1985 * 109 Machida (

Machida, Tokyo is a Cities of Japan, city located in West Tokyo, the western portion of Tokyo Metropolis, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 428,851, and a population density of 6,000 persons per km². The total area of the city was . Geography ...

) - July 2002 * Shizuoka 109 (

Shizuoka, Shizuoka is the capital city of Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, and the prefecture's second-largest city in both population and area. It has been populated since prehistoric times. the city had an estimated population of 690,881 in 106,087 households, and ...

) - October 2007 *: Created in March 2006 as Shibuya 109 Dreams, later recreated into the current 109. * Minatomirai 109 (

Yokohama is the second-largest city in Japan by population and the most populous municipality of Japan. It is the capital city and the most populous city in Kanagawa Prefecture, with a 2020 population of 3.8 million. It lies on Tokyo Bay, south of To ...

) - April 2010 * Shibuya 109 Abeno (

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of 2. ...

) - April 2011

References

* * *

External links

Official website

109Men's

Kohrinbo 109

109 Machida
{{DEFAULTSORT:109 (Department Store) 1979 establishments in Japan Shopping malls established in 1979 Buildings and structures in Shibuya Tokyu Group Department stores of Japan Articles with unsupported PUA characters