The Characters, Types and Sizes of the Underground Shopping Streets

Abstract

The attractive retail activities of the underground shopping streets on the cities of Japan are one of the most famous in the world, the underground shopping streets provide spaces for activity for more than one eighth of all Japanese population including businessmen, passengers and shoppers. There are one hundred and forty-three underground shopping streets which carry out retail business activities among one hundred and forty-six underground streets in all Japan.The result of the author's study on the underground shopping streets are summarized as follows : (1) The underground shopping streets are composed of the pure collective stores and they occupy less space ratio for selling compared with the space ratio occupied by plaza, streets and others on the underground streets. The special trend of the flow of pedestrians on the underground shopping streets such as increase of passers-by in the evening on weekdays can explain that they have the characters of the amusement quarters actually and mostly composed of restaurants, tea-rooms, bars, groceries and confectionaries.The underground shopping streets located near at central business districts involve more shops selling shopping goods (60%) than shops selling articles such as foods, cakes and drinkings (40%) compared with the underground shopping streets located on railway terminals which involve 40% shops selling shopping goods while there are 60% shops selling foods, cakes and drinkings.And, though the varieties of the land value on the central shopping streets in the cities are generally remarkable, the ones on the underground shopping streets are less discriminated, and in view point of the variety of the land value, the ranking of the underground shopping streets corresponds to the secondary and third class shopping streets in the city region.From the fact the underground shopping streets provide not only for the objects of shopping customers but also for those of amenity seekers and that the characters of amenity exceeds those provided by central shopping streets, they may be defined to be the amusement quarters.(2) When the population of the city surpasses 200, 000, there emerges underground selling floors in some business establishments in central shopping streets, and they come to form a conglomeration of underground selling floors resulting to an underground shopping streets.Three types of underground shopping streets are observed according to the grades of their development : (1) The first underground selling floors of railway stationbuilding and business-building. The enlarged space floors from those of type (1). (3) The underground shopping streets which generally command more than 10, 000 square metres in space and involve more than 100 in numbers of stores and establishments. And type (3) will be divided in the following three subtypes ; (a) the first selling underground floors located at railway station plaza, city plaza and their extended streets. (b) the first and second underground selling floors located at type (1). (c) the first underground selling floors compounded with type (1) and type (2).The ratio of plazas and streets to selling quarters has the trend to increase from type (1) to type (3) as they develop and this phenomenon seems to show the increase of the character of amenity.(3) The existing numbers of underground floors in department stores in a district closely related to the scope of the underground shopping streets, and those cities whose departmentstores have come to develop underground floors give the formation of underground shopping streets. The underground shopping streets which are attributed to type (1) correspond to D class (30-49) and E class (1-29) in terms of classification according to the numbers of stores and establishments in cities populated more than 200, 000.