Japanese cities can disappoint. Visitors stroll around hoping to be awe-struck by the dreamy spectacle of clip-clopping Geisha in their wooden geita, or barreling sumo wrestlers, or high-stockinged ninja girls (à la Kill Bill), and all against a Blade Runner backdrop, only to be confronted with mostly unremitting blandness. The constants are these: concrete, plastic, more concrete, more plastic, endless construction (one crappy shopping complex or mansion block replacing another), confusion, and noise. It can all seem dizzyingly homogenous.

The defining feature of the Japanese city these days is the ubiquitous convenience store or “konbini,” the scaled-down supermarkets/post offices/banks/…whatever the customer requires it to be. There are 7500 in Tokyo alone (one for every 1800 people) and 56,000 in the whole country, with some regional variation but three dominant chains: 7-11, Lawson, and Family Mart. Konbini are everywhere, and unlike every other business in Japan, branches never seem to close, though new ones are constantly springing up.

Normally, konbini are too bland, too boring, too familiar to be worth consideration or comment, but the recent death of the “visionary” businessman Toshifumi Suzuki at the age of 93, has focused minds here on the konbini’s cultural and societal role. For it was Suzuki who introduced and refined the concept from its original home in the US (where a form of the convenience store had existed since the 1920s) and made it palatable for Japanese tastes. While not exactly a household name, Suzuki had arguably more influence on Japanese households than almost anyone else in the last 50 years. 

It all began on a business trip in the early 70s when Suzuki noticed the success of the 7-11 convenience stores and decided it........

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