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Paper short abstract

Japan’s postwar refrigeration revolution transformed food distribution, leading to the rise of the convenience store. Cold-chain logistics reshaped shopping habits, undermined neighborhood economies, and opened space for new retail forms that blended corporate-scale distribution with local presence.

Paper long abstract

This paper traces how Japan’s postwar “refrigeration revolution” transformed food distribution and retail structures, culminating in the rise of the convenience store. It argues that the spread of cold-chain logistics—from refrigerated trucks to household fridges—reshaped shopping habits, weakened traditional neighborhood economies, and opened space for new retail forms that blended corporate-scale distribution with local presence.

In the 1950s and early 60s, Japanese consumers still shopped in highly localized, relational economies. With limited refrigeration in homes or stores, housewives made multiple daily trips to specialized merchants, often buying on credit and negotiating prices. This system depended on dense, gendered social ties and on a high frequency of face-to-face exchange. The rapid rise of supermarkets in the 1960s challenged this world. Chains such as Daiei and Ito-Yokado introduced self-service, bulk buying, and American-style cold-chain logistics that allowed them to sell a wide range of remotely processed food products, undercutting butchers, greengrocers and dairy distributors while redrawing patterns of urban mobility.

Supermarkets’ expansion sparked intense political and economic resistance. Small retailer associations, agricultural cooperatives, and housewives’ groups denounced supermarkets as threats to local livelihoods, price stability, and food safety. Their campaigns—framed variously as anti-monopoly, anti-Americanization, and pro-neighborhood—coincided with wider protest cultures of the late 1960s. These groups successfully pressured the Liberal Democratic Party, itself reliant on small-business votes, to pass the 1974 Large Store Law and its 1978 revision, which imposed lengthy consultation processes on any new large-format store. These regulations slowed supermarket growth and created opportunities for alternative models of expansion.

It was in this environment that franchised convenience stores emerged. Unable to build large outlets, supermarket companies turned to the dense fabric of family-run shops. By licensing American brands such as Lawson and 7-Eleven and offering small shopkeepers access to modern logistics, refrigeration, and standardized inventory, these firms created a hybrid retail form: locally embedded yet supply-chain driven. For struggling mom-and-pop retailers, franchising promised survival amid shifting consumer habits. But it made them dependent on the supply chains of their competitors and further eroded the credit networks that had knit local neighborhoods together.