It has more stores than Mall of America, the biggest shopping center in the US. And it has its own railway station. The humongous Aeon Laketown Mall is not just a shopping destination, it is a destination in itself. Read on to find out more.
It really is surprisingly big. Aeon Koshigaya Laketown is bigger, in fact, than most other shopping centers in the world. Had it been managed in the same way as shopping centers in most Western countries, it would come in at place number 10, just pushing the Mall of America off the list.
When you are inside, it is hard to feel like you can see everything in a day. It takes at least 45 minutes to walk from the Koshigaya Laketown station on one end to the Toyota dealership at the other. All air-conditioned and indoors, which makes this shopping center an attractive destination during the increasingly hot Japanese summers.
While there are shopping malls all over Japan cut from the same mold, with an Aeon department store, cinema, and multiple specialty and fashion stores, Laketown makes them look like miniature copies. The Aeon group runs retail operations all over Japan — from corner grocery stores to neighborhood shopping centers — but nowhere do they do so more spectacularly than in Laketown.
The center is divided in three main buildings: The Kaze (wind) and Mori (forest) parts which are connected by a walkway that makes them, in effect, one single building with hundreds of shops, many duplicated between the two main buildings since customers can not be counted on to find their way to specialist shops in a completely different part of the center, although some stores definitely count on this as a strategy to attract customers.
The outdoor part is the Outlet part. While the two indoor halls have names, the Outlet part of the mall does not have a fancy name. It is just an Outlet. And that is just what it is — outlet stores for famous brands looking to sell second-rate or outdated models at a bargain. Or as often hold a regular sale of their ordinary products. While the brands in the Koshigaya Laketown outlet stores are frequently associated with high profiles and high quality, that also means they have to shed the previous generations of their products so the stores can be stocked with new, appetizing goods.
The variation is striking, and sometimes you wonder if the merchandise is really marked down, and definitely if these are second-rate goods. Sylvanian Family toys, for instance, may not be second-rate (although they evidently change the models often). Tefal cookware, on the other hand, may have some invisible scratches, making the maker mark the merchandise down. And sports goods makers like Nike or Under Armour may certainly have slight defects in their products, although, looking in the stores, it is hard to believe.
The fashion stores in the main buildings, meanwhile, are as typical of modern Japanese fashion as you can get. Even though they are mostly mainstream, there are a few edgier stores, and ”Gothic Lolita” clothes are slowly moving into the Japanese fashion mainstream, although Western sizes (of any type of clothes) may be hard to find in Laketown. Especially when it comes to shoes.
If you should be lucky (or petite) and manage to find something you can wear, look out for another peculiarly Japanese institution: The timesale. Suddenly, the store staff will start announcing a time sale. More often than not, it includes everything in the store. But sometimes it is only selected goods. Look out carefully for which.
The time sale is exactly what it says: a sale for a limited time only, sometimes as little as ten minutes. If you do happen upon a time sale for something you want, do not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity. It will be gone before you know it.
The Aeon Laketown shopping center is not only a shopping destination, but it is also a foodie paradise. You can find restaurants representing virtually all of the world’s cuisines here, with extensive restaurant streets and food courts in both the Kaze and Mori buildings. While the restaurant offering is in constant flux, the restaurants changing if they are unpopular, there are a few that keep bringing in customers. The soba restaurant in the Kaze restaurant alley, for instance, has a line several hours long almost from the instant it opens in the morning.
The most interesting restaurants are just after you exit the walkway from the Outlet building to the Mori building, where a few specialty places are worth looking up.
Naturally, eating is not the only way to get nutrition here. There are cafes galore in the three main buildings, with several Starbucks and other places for coffee lovers, places for tea lovers (including a Starbucks that only serves tea), places for lovers of bubble tea, and specialty cafes like cat cafes and pig cafes.
You pay to cuddle the mini pigs for half an hour. Coffee is included (for you, not the pigs). The mini pigs are surprisingly cuddly and highly social (and toilet-trained).
The outlet part of the mall is the outdoor part, and most of the year it is quite pleasant, even offering great protection against rain, although not wind. Sitting around the outdoor tables and sipping a latte, looking out over the lake, makes you feel like you are on vacation, even though you are shopping hard.
This is the reason the Laketown shopping center does not make it on top of the global shopping mall rankings is that this is an outdoor shopping center, or at least one third of it. A lakefront outdoor shopping center.
Because of course, Laketown has a lake. The entire area is built on the swamps that once surrounded the edges of Tokyo Bay, and that means not only the Laketown shopping center. With the creative placement of drainage ditches and strategically placed landfill, the entire area has been transformed from swampy farmland to huge apartment complexes, stand-alone houses, and Koshigaya Laketown. But to maintain a safe groundwater level, there are several lakes (actually ponds, but big enough to sail a boat on) in the area. And the biggest, as is fitting, is really in front of the Laketown complex, and it is big enough to sail at least a small boat on.
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