OSAKA -- A section chief of Takashimaya Co., Ltd., a leading department store chain operator, sold data on about 500,000 customers in July 1995 to a mail list dealer in Tokyo for 500,000 yen, company sources said Friday.

The data, which has yet to be recovered, was later sold to direct mail dealers and others, the sources said. The department store dismissed the section chief, who was not named, from his position at its Osaka head office but has yet to explain the theft of the data to its customers.

According to the company, the section chief stole information including individual member's name, sex, address, birth date and telephone number listings of one of the store's special clubs.

About 3 million people were enrolled in the club at the time, and the data was stored on a host computer at the head office, the sources said. The employee, head of the system management department at the Osaka office, copied the data onto a magnetic tape in July 1995, according to the sources. The employee, who is in his 30s, then sold the data to a name list dealer at a Tokyo restaurant for 500,000 yen, they said.

The theft came to light after a Kyoto customer approached the company about the possibility of a data leak after receiving direct mail from an adult video marketing company, they said. In an internal investigation, the section chief admitted that he needed money and stole the data after seeing an advertisement offering cash for such information, the sources said.