Daimaru Kobe turns its front street into a café terrace for a second year
For the second November running, Daimaru Kobe and Kobe City are closing the street in front of the store to cars and filling it with coffee stalls instead -- a small, repeatable experiment in turning a flagship's own frontage into pedestrian retail space rather than relying on the store's four walls.
J. Front Retailing said Daimaru Kobe will co-host the second edition of "Kyu-Kyoryuchi Terrace Days," a two-day placemaking event turning the street outside the store into a pedestrian café zone, on November 6 and 7, according to a company release. The event runs on Nakamachi-dori, in front of Daimaru Kobe and the THE 45th building, and on the plaza in front of the nearby Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation building, with Kobe City as co-host and free admission.
Five food-and-drink operators take part: THE ORIENT, a hotel; coffee roasters Takamura Coffee Roasters, Taoca Coffee and Geshary Coffee; and Bakery K-Port. A ¥1,500 café ticket set, sold at THE ORIENT's booth on Nakamachi-dori, bundles one drink each from that booth, the bank-plaza venue and a café inside Daimaru Kobe itself; visitors without a ticket can still buy individually at each stall. An executive committee of four local companies -- Minami, Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Stores, Takasago Shoko and Murakami Komuten -- organises the event.
Running the same experiment twice in two years turns a one-off street closure into something closer to policy: Daimaru Kobe is using its own frontage, not its selling floor, to draw visitors into the old foreign-settlement district, with the department store itself as one stop among several independent cafés rather than the sole attraction. For a flagship competing with newer retail in central Kobe, ceding some of the spotlight to the neighbourhood's own cafés is a cheap way to keep the whole district, not just the store, feeling worth the trip.