Japan may be at the forefront of te

Japan may be at the forefront of technology, but don’t tell that to the Culture Convenience Club, operators of Tsutaya. The company has placed a big bet with a flagship store in the tony neighborhood of Daikanyama that celebrates a seemingly old-fashioned product: books.

Launched in December, the Tsutaya flagship is the centerpiece of Daikanyama T-Site, a 5,600-square-meter property owned by the company, which has almost 1,500 stores across Japan. Tsutaya Books shares space with a Starbucks and a convenience store across three two-story blocks of glass-reinforced concrete (zoning regulations meant they couldn’t be combined into one building). Tenants ranging from a restaurant to a pet store and an electric-bicycle retailer occupy low-lying buildings across the rest of the grounds, which are enclosed by canopy of trees.

The bookstore has drawn the most plaudits, not least for its design by Klein Dytham Architecture, the firm behind projects such as Tokyo after-hours spot SuperDeluxe. The firm made use of dark-chocolate-hued bookshelves and blond-wood floors to give the store an intimate feel. Anjin, a low-lit café-lounge with plush leather seats, is particularly cozy.

While its counterparts in the West are scaling back, the Daikanyama flagship is a significant investment in the power of print. Tsutaya did not disclose its initial investment, but the store stocks more than 140,000 fiction and nonfiction titles, mostly in Japanese.

In case books weren’t enough, the store stocks close to 80,000 DVDs and 100,000 CDs, though in a break from conventional retailing, its sections are grouped according to theme rather than media type — for instance, you’ll find a DVD of the movie “Roman Holiday” right next to a guidebook of Rome. There are also shelves heavy with vinyl records from the 1950s and ’60s, and 30,000 magazine back issues dating to the 1970s.