This weekend marks the grand opening of Mitsui Outlet Park Kisarazu, a so-called outlet mall in the coastal city of Kisarazu in Chiba Prefecture. So far the mall has 171 stores, including 21 retailers that have never before participated in any Japanese outlet mall. Mitsui Fudosan, which developed and manages the facility, says it hopes to eventually have 250 stores in the mall. Its sales target for the first year is between ¥32 billion and ¥34 billion, which would make it the biggest money-maker of the 12 outlet malls the company operates.

Mitsui isn't the only developer staking its future on the success of American-style suburban shopping complexes. In Japan there are now 39 outlet malls, which are characterized by stores that are directly owned and run by manufacturers. In principle, that means cutting out one or more middlemen and offering greater savings on name-brand goods. According to the most recent statistics we could find there are more than 1,600 "shopping malls" in Japan, though most of these are urban complexes that vary significantly in style and form from the classic American-style shopping mall.

Nevertheless, over the past decade or so, the number of shopping malls has increased in suburban areas as more traditional shopping arcades (shotengai) have declined in number or even vanished. The main features of these suburban shopping malls is one or two large "anchor" retailers, usually a department store and/or major supermarket chain, and, most significant for Japan, the fact that they aren't located near train stations, where land is more expensive. That means they target motorists and feature the sort of enormous parking lots that are ubiquitous in the United States but which, until recently, were unheard of in Japan.