Once the emblem of Hong Kong’s middle-class dreams, SOGO was more than a department store – it was a stage for aspiration, service, and desire. In this essay, Jaime Chu revisits its mirrored corridors to ask what the city’s rituals of consumption reveal about modern life and how we learned to want.
It was the last weeks of November, and fall was fumbling through its way towards winter. I needed a light down comforter to replace my summer blanket, advertised last season as both ‘cooling’ and ‘made for air conditioning’. Hong Kong is my fourth city in three years. Living itinerantly as an adult means constantly searching for things others have long ago settled on, either by inheritance or by accumulation: a dignified mattress, a home entertainment system, contacts for a dentist and hairdresser.
I was in the market for a down comforter that might replicate the feeling of being swaddled by a piece of soft, fluffy cloud. It seemed like a problem that IKEA, Muji, or even HKTVmall could easily solve. But I was determined not to replicate my reliance on the slackness of global mass manufacturing that had followed me from city to city as I reassembled my life each time according to a post-globalisation start-up apartment protocol – one that guarantees a neutral, familiar line of basic household products would transition seamlessly wherever I ended up. Hong Kong, after all, was historically a textile hub. What if there were still a whisper network of affordable, good-quality bedding suppliers?
One night, my friend Charis weighed in, ‘This might sound very see lai, but have you considered SOGO?’ See lai: wives who spend too much time thinking about their home; clearly, they would know something I don’t.
I also don’t know anyone my age who still goes to SOGO. My most salient memory of the landmark department store is shopping there with my mum as a child, freed from the usual frictions of moving about as a heterodox family unit of four, following our baseless desires and being coaxed into breezy transactions by a crew of smooth-faced elevator girls in skirt suits and bowler hats: young, uniform, and otherworldly.1 Now, as an adult, going to SOGO – eating yōshoku pasta at the UCC Coffee Shop on the fourth floor or getting my eyebrows shaped by a possibly overpriced and rigidly professional technician – sounds like a funny and ironic idea, as long as you bypass the luxury designer counters at street level and focus instead on the banal and the quotidian. Charis gives genius recommendations because she is very online but also locally aware, very married but not (yet) resigned on taste, respects labour but anti-work. I can always count on her for pragmatic solutions to my aesthetic – which is often economic – problems.
Established in Osaka in 1919, SOGO began as a second-hand kimono shop dating back to 1830. By the 1980s, it had expanded into a department-store chain across Japan and abroad, with branches at one point in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China. Since SOGO opened in Hong Kong in 1985, the Causeway Bay flagship store has grown to occupy an entire block, with twelve floors of retail devoted to everything from clothing and homeware to toys and massage chairs. A beauty salon and a bookstore operate under the guise of a members’ club on the upper floors, while a food hall occupies the basement, following the conventional Japanese department-store layout. From the start, SOGO advertised itself as a Japanese-style one-stop shop for a fashionable and high-quality lifestyle, differentiating itself by featuring cutting-edge local designers such as Judy Mann and William Tang alongside international brands.
By virtue of having everything under one roof, SOGO, like all department stores, minimised the friction of going in and out of individual shops and created the feeling of variety within a tightly predetermined selection. The branded architecture of the store encoded both the performative normalcy of shopping as a destination activity – modern, tasteful, and pleasantly purposeless – and the cosmopolitan promise of access – at once aspirational and mainstream – to imported household goods against a strong yen, unlike the local Wing On or the mainland-oriented Yue Hwa. Before the yen’s downward spiral and budget airlines made Japan directly accessible, Japanese retail in Hong Kong offered a delicate balance between novelty and familiarity, an appetite any soft power would envy.
‘Meet me at SOGO’ was the beginning and end of countless urban lives in Hong Kong. The iconic cerulean-blue logo in the shape of the Windows hourglass waiting cursor marks the intersection of Hennessy Road and Lockhart Road, visible whichever way you arrive in Causeway Bay: by foot, tram, or bus. For a child raised in a suburban area still unpenetrated by the MTR in the 1990s and 2000s, Causeway Bay embodied the image of a city as a modern world. Ruthlessly crowded, commercial, and somehow more central than Central, Causeway Bay represented the enviable lives of independent adults and older teenage friends who could eat out during lunch hour at school or spend pocket money after school on snacks or stationery.
For an eleven-year-old, to ‘go shopping after dinner’ struck me as the hallmark of chic, when after-dinner shopping near my home had meant the bargain-hunting at JHC and ParknShop. And for the longest time, I believed that ‘Times Square’ referred only to the one in Causeway Bay, and that the Shibuya-style crossing in front of SOGO was a defining feature of all cities. (Imagine my disappointment when I eventually visited Time Square in New York, and my naïve awe on encountering Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo.) Causeway Bay, being the closest urban district by bus, was where my parents took me to the doctor, shopped for school supplies, and went to the cinema. The suburbs were where we lived, but the city was where life happened.
Still, as a child of the suburbs without first-hand intel from the downtown streets, I knew little of mobile phone models and designer items, or the latest pop-culture and media obsessions. I rarely knew what was available to ask for or what I was missing out on. So I could hardly imagine the reason my mom took me seriously one day, when I must have been six or seven years old, I told her I wanted a skirt. Having no anticipation of what naming a desire actually entailed, without knowing what kind of skirt I even wanted or why I had wanted a skirt, I was bewildered and then elated when my mom took me on the bus to SOGO one day after school, where we spent the afternoon roaming the floors, trying clothes on until we ended up with not one but two skirts. This was definitely not like when we went shopping at the neighbourhood mall, where excitement would quickly be tempered by the see lai maths of price-comparing and inter-family negotiations of ice cream versus Sara Lee cake for dessert. At SOGO, all that was asked was: ‘Do you like it?’ I must have been too astonished at the novelty of shopping together – of having a wish fulfilled, a desire legitimated – to know how to behave that day. Did I even say thank you?
To re-learn how to navigate the city when I moved back was to learn how to shop. Shopping in Hong Kong for me feels less about conspicuous lifestyle than it is about negotiating survival. Consumerism is built into the way we move through the city: footbridges linking residential buildings, markets, and MTR stations; restaurants expanding seating into public space through legal loopholes; underused public space embedded in apparently un-encroachable private developments; megacomplexes where you might accomplish all kinds of tasks in a day, from ice-skating lessons to filing government paperwork, without ever having to leave an air-conditioned glass box. Even getting to the ferry pier to go home every day required passing through the IFC mall and its carousel of products I neither need nor could afford. What is made visible and material – shaped by the rules and regulations of commerce and private property – becomes the emotional texture of our built world. For all its impersonality, it contains the things we cannot help but become attached to. I wish I had a meet-cute story from an independently-run vinyl-bookstore-coffee co-op, but all I have formed is a mild attachment to the steely efficiency of the staff who handles the morning rush at my local McCafé.
There would be no SOGO without Causeway Bay. The area first became what we now recognise as Causeway Bay – a thriving commercial hub on expensive real estate – in 1923, when Hawaiian-born Hong Kong businessman Lee Hysan purchased large plots of land from Jardine Matheson, the British conglomerate. The site at East Point lay slightly east of today’s SOGO and encompassed what are now Jardine’s Crescent, Yee Wo Street, and East Point Road.
Sold to Jardine Matheson in Hong Kong’s first land sale in 1841, East Point was named after a cape in the Victoria Harbour that marked the eastern end of Victoria City. Jardine Matheson built sugar refineries, storage facilities, and cotton mills in East Point. Hysan originally planned to add an opium refinery to his new holdings but instead built Lee Gardens, a theme park and entertainment district in the hilly area. The site was later flattened and redeveloped into shopping and office complexes as Hysan continued to acquire neighbouring plots. Today, Hysan Development owns over 2.4 million square feet of office space and remains the largest commercial landlord in Causeway Bay.
After the Second World War, as Japan’s domestic retail market became increasingly saturated, Japanese conglomerates began to eye expansion into Hong Kong, drawn by its fast-growing economy and light government regulation.2 In 1960, Daimaru planted itself at the corner of Paterson Street and Great George Street in Causeway Bay, where a soybean warehouse and Vitasoy factory once stood. Over the next three decades, Matsuzakaya, Mitsukoshi, Seibu, and SOGO followed, collectively introducing and mainstreaming Japanese culture and consumer goods in Hong Kong. At its height, Mitsukoshi even generated over 40% of its total overseas revenue from the Hong Kong store. For Japanese workers, taking up an overseas position offered an appealing alternative career path, and this brought hostess clubs, izakayas, and other Japanese amenities as they settled into Hong Kong. Much of the commercial landscape in Causeway Bay and Tsim Sha Tsui was shaped by this influx, and Causeway Bay earned the moniker of ‘Little Ginza’.
SOGO was amongst the last to arrive in Hong Kong, but it made up for lost time with a prominent facade. The year of its opening, 1985, was also significant in Hong Kong history. The opening day on 31 May coincided with the inaugural operation of the MTR Island Line running beneath the SOGO building at 555 Hennessy Road. That year, one year after the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed,3 the face of Hong Kong’s quintessential infrastructure – Exchange Square, the High Court Building, functional constituencies in the Legislative Council, and the Hong Kong Basic Law Drafting Committee – all began to take shape.
This was the Hong Kong I was born into, yet there was already a sense of being too late – in the way things were talked about, in the way I could never be sure what I had missed. Sure, SOGO may have been an undeniable, modern landmark, but it meant little to my mother, who had already seen the best days of Daimaru (closed 1998) and Yaohan (closed 1997). I wonder if this, too, was a quintessential urban condition: your experience would never measure up to someone else’s memory.
At Christmas in 1998, my aunt from New York visited, and our family went out to dinner in Causeway Bay. Before efficient LED displays and ESG guidelines dimmed the spectacle, the criminal excess of Christmas lights lining both sides of Hennessy Road was something to be proud of. We would cut through Jardine’s Bazaar to reach Lee Gardens, circle back on the other side of Times Square through the noodle shops and bars on Tang Lung Street and Russell Street, and somehow wind up at Gooseneck Bridge, where its bazaar of old women was ready to perform a ceremonious Cantonese ‘villain-hitting’ curse on your enemy for a small fee.
Arriving at Gooseneck Bridge meant the night was over. We would wait for the bus that came every 15 minutes to take us home through the tunnel. The city ended here.
If I had missed the memo to take the hiragana lessons everybody else seemed to have taken at some point before age 25, it didn’t take long after I moved back to Hong Kong to realise I could hack my way through almost any conversation by intimating Japan: the redeye flight schedule to Haneda, konbini meals and pharmacy skincare discoveries, the filming locations of canonical music videos and TV shows. Knowing this much about something I can’t tell if I care about is embarrassing, but the alternative is worse: listening to someone else mansplain Japan. The only way to outweeb the weebs is to become a more dedicated, more informed weeb.
The summer Miu Miu single-handedly populated high street with the office normcore princess look, I decided it was time to pose a counterargument by tracing the aesthetic influence of 1990s East Asian capitalist-modern optimism through the canon of Japanese TV romance: Long Vacation, Love Generation, Tokyo Love Story and the like. Eventually, I found the 1992 drama Tokyo Elevator Girl. A version survives online in only 360p on Youtube, digitised from someone’s VHS recording with Chinese subtitles.
In Tokyo Elevator Girl, the eponymous character Tsukasa (played by a 19-year-old Rie Miyazawa) leaves her small island in Shikoku for Tokyo and finds work as an elevator operator at a SOGO in Tama, south-western Tokyo (closed 2000). You can immediately tell SOGO was a big deal from the way the golden boy from the advertising department berates the small printer for botching a bulk printing job of the new season’s promotional posters: if they cannot reprint overnight, SOGO is happy to take its business elsewhere.
At her new job, Tsukasa befriends an information-desk girl who became the centre of a scandal when her affair with the married store manager was exposed. The consequences presage Tsukasa’s own romantic dilemma that plays out in the rest of the series when she falls in love with an earnest, married man from Osaka (the provincial foil to cosmopolitan Tokyo) who works for that same printer contracted by the ad department. The personal and work lives of these characters intersect in SOGO’s backrooms and elevators – spaces portrayed as quintessentially urban, where ‘people walk around, find themselves standing before and inside piles of objects, experience the intertwining of the threads of their activities until they become unrecognisable, entangle situations in such a way that they engender unexpected situations.’4 Anyone can run into anyone; anything can happen.
Is that what girls want: to present impeccably at work and enjoy the chaos of life after work? As an occupation, elevator operators had originally served a functional role when manual elevators required technical skill and knowledge to operate. In 1929, when women were mostly kept out of the workforce, the Ueno branch of Matsuzakaya in Tokyo became the first department store to hire female elevator operators, dressed in Western-style skirt-suit uniforms rather than Japanese wafuku to signify the international and the modern.5
By the 1990s, elevators were fully automated and no longer required manual assistance. Automation opened up a low-skilled position with high emotional value to more young women, creating a path for women to become financially and socially independent and to participate in urban life. As a symbol of modernity for Japanese department stores, elevator operators were also the emotional core of customer relations. All-female, dressed in creamy skirt suits and chic hats, they smiled, greeted, and guided, introducing the geography of the store and presenting the daily promotions. Elevator-operator positions were highly coveted by young women across education levels.
At the heart of Tokyo Elevator Girl is a tension between work and desire, between the longing that drives the characters and the labour that sustains them; there is a certain tension in the plot, hinging on everyone getting to keep their jobs.6 Tsukasa and her female customer-facing co-workers at the Tama SOGO are held to misogynistically high moral standards in their personal conduct, while an elevator girl’s decorum and emotional availability are treated as part of the department store’s assets. A woman caught in scandal, such as an affair, risks demotion to the back office, as if her personal life could tarnish the spotless market of desire that the department store represents. As part of what the department store is selling, the elevator girl must endure attention and misbehaviour with professional grace; her image of perfection as a desirable object becomes her product, and her performance of perfect desirability is her profession.
The elevator girl’s agency, enabled by an independent income and urban mobility, keeps her just shy of becoming a cyborg, a body that can labour but not reproduce, an imperfect capitalist subject. Her fate is telling: when costs and efficiency eventually became a concern for the bottom line, department stores chose to retire elevator girls rather than replace them with robots. With her self-sufficiency, proximity to technology, and performance of gendered labour, the elevator girl’s enduring appeal becomes even more perfect precisely because her labourious reign was short-lived. As the printer Yoshimoto observes in the first episode, ‘Elevator girls are over; it is now the age of the flight attendants.’ Three years after this show, in 1995, Chungking Express shows a flight attendant as an elusive love object, while a dilettante snack-shop girl would later self-actualise by becoming one herself.
The rise of the department store in the late 19th century accompanied industrialisation around the world, spawning a new commercial public. In the name of love, class differences collapse into each other on the floors of the department store: the WASP-y patron seduces the immigrant shopgirl (Carol); the aspiring artist as sales girl rejects a suave older businessman (Shopgirl); the heiress sets her sight on the star manager to protect her fortune (The Paradise). We might think that mid-century imagery of uniformed workers represented conformity and of a collectivity closer to a socialist-futurist agenda, but the attraction to the uniformed operative even after globalisation – elevator girls, flight attendants, service smiles – speaks directly to, among other perversions – why we crave ‘normalcy’. As Lauren Berlant reminds us, the desire for normalcy signals ‘crisis ordinary’: the historical present as ‘a transition that has not found its genres for moving on.’ Following the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the 1990s, elevator-girl positions were made redundant as department stores cut costs. As career options for women expanded, the long hours and physical demands of the job also lost their attraction.
A 2015 news article reported that the average tenure of an elevator girl at the Pacific SOGO in Taipei was two years.7 It was hard to ascertain when the Hong Kong SOGO phased out elevator operators.8 By the time I returned, the elevator girls were no longer.
But the elevator girl lives on, because we recognise her in someone else, again and again.
If we are to believe Lefebvre, 'Until the arrival of a new order, the urban will never lack an element of repression, which arises from what is hidden within it and the will to keep hidden the dramas, the latent violence, death, and the quotidian.'9 After the Japanese company’s bankruptcy, SOGO Hong Kong was sold to Lifestyle International Holdings. The Causeway Bay SOGO replaced the static billboard on its facade with what it claims is the largest outdoor LED screen in the Asia-Pacific region, with its surface covering an area larger than five tennis courts combined.10 A week-long video ad costs HKD 145,00011 – a tidy sum to pay for human attention. A singularly glowing, irrepressively demanding physical presence seems to have enabled and concealed as much of the 'rational delirium' of both immense conflicts and euphoric frenzy gathering right below the SOGO facade in the next two decades.12
Across the harbour, a new SOGO opened in Kai Tak to premature fanfare. Within six months, low foot traffic forced the store to shorten its hours. Without an iconic facade, an accessible street entrance, or a boom-era bustle, the suburbanised distance of Kai Tak feels symbolic: a foreclosure of imagination in a city that has for so long been driven by the momentum of its capitalist modernity. If a certain nihilistic expenditure in commercial life after dark exists to counter the daytime suffering of ordinary crises, what could be possible in a city where stores close at 9pm and last orders are taken at 8:30pm? Do we simply submit to the domination of the nine-to-five without at least attempting to mount a rebuttal against capitalistic time by exhausting ourselves on anti-productive pleasures and after-hours entanglements?
One evening after work, I made my way to SOGO. Shopping there for the first time in 20 years, everything somehow seemed like a lesser version of what it could have been. Instead of beautiful women with repressed emotional lives, I was greeted by aggressively banal marketers urging me to download an app. The stalkerish sales tactic prevails, which feels even sadder when too many items appear on sale. Kitchen tools and tableware ubiquitous in Japan at lower price points appear here at an unjustifiable mark-up on the tenth floor. The department store is no longer a place to experience progress or novelty; it has become just another place to run another errand. It feels, against all odds, incredibly normal.
I had always assumed the supremacy of the department store lay in its magnanimity towards the purpose-driven but restless: a kind of capitalist commune, eternally luminant and eternally present, where one could freely kill time and freely move on. But the dopamine hit once found in strolling through serial displays of merchandise have now migrated to the infinite scroll of shopping apps – virtual departure stores optimised for predictive habits. There are now as many storefronts as there are personalised algorithms. In turn, physical retail behaves more and more like a logistical endpoint rather than the beginning of a discovery. When leisure feels too much like work – not that we shouldn’t press our own elevator buttons – is this really the future we asked for?
I did not find the down comforter of my dreams. I left SOGO and went down the street to IKEA.