Jiyugaoka gets its first major station-front rebuild in a century
A 15-storey complex with roughly 60 shops opened in front of Jiyugaoka Station on 17 September — the first big covered building the district has put up since the station itself opened, according to the redevelopment union behind it, and a floor-space event with real consequences for every independent shop already on the street.
JIYUGAOKA MUSE SQUARE, a 15-storey complex built directly in front of Jiyugaoka Station, opened on 17 September with roughly 60 shops, offices and flats — the first big covered building the district has put up since the station itself opened, according to the redevelopment union behind it.
The Jiyugaoka 1-chome 29 District Urban Redevelopment Union, made up of local landowners, developed the tower with Hulic and general contractor Kajima; Sumitomo Corporation's Sumisho Urban Development arranged the leasing. The building rises 15 storeys above ground and three below, reaches about 60 metres, and carries roughly 46,000 square metres of total floor area, of which about 11,000 square metres is retail. Construction began in October 2023.
The union frames the timing around the roughly 100 years since Jiyugaoka Station opened, and says the project looks toward the district's next century. In its own release, it points to a specific worry behind the push: without a proper large-scale covered facility, the shopping street risked slow decline, and landowners banded together on what it calls a leading project to reverse that.
A supermarket, a childcare floor, and 60 shops
Anchoring the retail floors is a new flagship of Meiji-ya, the upmarket grocer long associated with Jiyugaoka, alongside a Starbucks-run share lounge. The fifth floor is given over entirely to Kodomo de Part Jiyugaoka, a childcare-and-education operation from Hulic that packs nursery care, an after-school programme, entrance-exam tutoring, a paediatric clinic, ABC Cooking Studio, an abacus school and other children's services onto one level — Hulic's own release describes it as the first time it has fitted all of that into a single floor, following two smaller Kodomo de Part sites in Nakano and Tamagawa that opened last April and together count more than 2,000 members. The building also houses two stores floortok has covered separately: a United Arrows womenswear shop and a new AIGLE store carrying a capsule with designer Satoshi Kuwata.
For a shopping street built on independent boutiques and cafés rather than department-store scale, adding roughly 11,000 square metres of new retail floor in one building is a real event, not a cosmetic one. It gives Jiyugaoka a single address that can host a supermarket, national fashion chains and an all-in-one childcare floor pulling in weekday family traffic — exactly the kind of anchor a mall or a station building uses to draw footfall. Whether the shops nearby gain from that traffic or lose ground to the rents a new, larger building can command is the question the union's own language, candid about the street's risk of decline, leaves open.