Consumer History | Shiseido — The Pharmacy That Opened on Izumo-cho, Ginza
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Consumer History | Shiseido — The Pharmacy That Opened on Izumo-cho, Ginza
kevin
People treat Shiseido as a cosmetics house that was always listed, always global, and always in Ginza as a showroom.
The firm began here as a pharmacy.
On 17 September 1872, Arinobu Fukuhara, who had resigned as chief pharmacist of the navy hospital, opened Japan's first private Western-style dispensing pharmacy on Izumo-cho in Ginza.
The site is the present Tokyo Ginza Shiseido Building at 8-8-3 Ginza, Chuo-ku. The registered head office remains nearby at 7-5-5 Ginza.
The name was taken from a line in the I Ching: the earth that nourishes all things.
Fukuhara's model was the separation of clinic and pharmacy, then still rare in Tokyo. The shop sold compounded medicines rather than a house brand of makeup.
In 1897 the pharmacy put out Eudermine, a reddish lotion that became the first widely sold Shiseido cosmetic. In 1902 a soda fountain opened in the same rooms after Fukuhara saw American drugstore fountains on the way home from the Paris Exposition.
That fountain became Shiseido Parlour. The cosmetics department later moved to a second Ginza shop while the Izumo-cho rooms kept the pharmacy and the restaurant.
Shiseido Company, Limited was incorporated on 24 June 1927. Common shares were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949.
The 1872 rooms did not survive as fabric. The 1962 hall by Yoshiro Taniguchi was taken down in 1997. Ricardo Bofill's successor building opened in March 2001 and still holds the Parlour and the Shiseido Gallery.
The Nikkei 225 company still dates its founding to this Ginza corner and to that September pharmacy.
The present corporate headquarters sits in Shiodome. The pilgrimage address is here, on the block where the first bottles were compounded.
Photo: Kentin, via Wikimedia Commons
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