It is Sunday and, if you live on the Pudong side of the Huangpu river, time to go to the Yaohan Department Store, with 10 floors and more than one million sq ft of shopping pleasure. 'It is my favourite store in Pudong,' said Gu Mei, a secretary, fighting her way through the crowds to the cosmetics counter. Annual sales are more than 1 billion yuan (HK$940 million). But not one fen of that money goes to 'Mr Yaohan', the man who built what was the largest department store in Asia when it opened on December 20, 1995. Kazuo Wada, 74, lives with his wife in a rented apartment in Fukuoka, in western Japan, running a management school, and ignored by the business elite he aspired to join.
Mr Wada was chairman of the Yaohan retail chain that started with a 100 sq ft vegetable store in Atami, south of Tokyo, in 1929. It grew to an international conglomerate with 400 outlets worldwide, an annual turnover of 500 billion yen (HK$33 billion) and 28,000 employees.
Mr Wada saw the potential in the China market years before his more cautious compatriots, opening his first Yaohan store in Hong Kong in 1984. In 1989, shortly after the military crackdown on student-led protests in Beijing, he took the extraordinary step of moving his global headquarters to Hong Kong. At a time when other multinationals were moving out, it was a shrewd political move that earned him kudos with officials in Beijing.
In 1991, he signed an agreement with the Shanghai government to build the Yaohan store in Pudong. Then he moved his corporate head office to Shanghai and announced plans to open 1,500 supermarkets in China by 2000.
Sadly, while he was busy in China, his company at home ran up debts of more than 200 billion yen, guaranteed in his name. In September 1997, it applied for bankruptcy and everything was sold. A state-owned company in Shanghai, Zhongbai Group, bought the Pudong store, along with the by-then famous name.
Asked to evaluate Mr Wada's contribution, a Zhongbai spokeswoman said she had not heard of him. Most shoppers, too, are unaware of Mr Wada's role. 'In Japan, people are very cruel to someone who fails,' he said in an interview last month. 'Once you fail, you are put in a corner where people despise you. If we do not change this mentality, then Japan has no tomorrow.'