1. From Soybeans to Sukiyaki (1960)
Before it was Causeway Bay's most famous shopping address, the site on Paterson Street had a far humbler life: a soybean warehouse, where Hong Kong's popular Vitasoy milk was manufactured until the company relocated to a purpose-built factory in Wong Chuk Hang in the 1950s.
On that same site, on 4 November 1960, the Japanese retail chain Daimaru (倧丸) opened its very first overseas branch β a bet on Causeway Bay, then still a district of warehouses rather than boutiques. Some 4,000 guests attended the opening cocktail party. Local newspapers described a store that felt genuinely international β a supermarket, a bazaar, an Italian tea room, and a Japanese dining hall staffed by chefs brought over specially from Japan.
2. A Revolution in Bowing and Bargains
Daimaru trained 400 local staff in Japanese-style customer service, supervised by 15 managers sent from Japan β rows of staff bowing to greet every customer at the door, fixed prices with no haggling, home delivery, instalment payments, free trial samples, and even kimono-dressed attendants offering makeup trials. Soft background music played throughout the store, a novelty in Hong Kong retail at the time.
The effect was immediate: nearly 100,000 customers passed through Daimaru's doors on its second day alone. This was precisely the competitive shock referenced β sometimes only in passing β throughout this series: it was Daimaru's arrival that forced Shui Hing's Central store to close in the early 1970s, and the wider wave of Japanese department stores it triggered reshaped the fortunes of nearly every Hong Kongβowned retailer covered so far.
3. The Gas Explosion and the Governor (1972)
By the early 1970s, Daimaru had become so woven into Hong Kong's civic life that when a gas explosion struck the store in October 1972, it was significant enough to draw Hong Kong's Governor, Sir Murray MacLehose, to personally review the scene β a measure of how central the store had become to the city, barely a decade after opening on what had been a stretch of warehouses.
Daimaru's success drew competitors in its wake. Over the next two decades, three more Japanese department stores β Matsuzakaya, Mitsukoshi, and Sogo β opened within a short walk of Daimaru's front door, and at their combined peak, the four stores occupied more than 500,000 square feet of retail space in Causeway Bay alone.
4. A Legacy That Outlived the Store
Daimaru's Cantonese nickname, Daai Yuen, became so embedded in everyday speech that it was adopted as the name of a nearby minibus terminus on Paterson Street β a name that has outlived the store itself by decades.
Rising rents and the fallout of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis proved fatal. Daimaru closed its doors in December 1998, after 38 years in business β the same year Matsuzakaya also shut its Causeway Bay store. Yet minibus drivers in Hong Kong still call out "Daai Yuen" as a destination today, a small piece of linguistic proof that a single department store, gone for over a quarter-century, permanently changed the way this city talks about its own streets.
Daimaru opened the door; three more Japanese department stores walked through it. Their story β the rise, and later the fall, of Hong Kong's "Little Ginza" β continues in the next chapter of this series.
