Japanese department stores cater to the whole person: they'll sell you a house along a railway line they just happen to own and an exotic foreign automobile with the steering wheel on the left to put in the garage. They'll teach you how to arrange flowers, how to wear the kimono, and how to scuba dive -- in a pool with an underwater window that looks out on a street full of gawkers. They'll make a writing brush out of the residue of your baby's first haircut and will be happy to outfit him or her in the uniform of the elementary school of your choice. When you can't take it anymore, they'll sell you a ticket to their own resort in Sri Lanka, travel insurance included.

On the seventh floor of any Tokyo department store there will be exhibitions like English Landscape Painting, Sculpture of Equatorial Africa, and Hitherto Unknown Photographs of Marilyn Monroe, complete with lavishly illustrated catalogs. There will be free clinics on how to recognize signs of rheumatism and gout, and adivce on cooking and diet in a world of tantalizing choices. They will inspect your teeth in their own dental clinic, repair your shoes while you wait, print your wedding invitation, and arrange for your funeral. They'll make up silk underwear to measure and sell you an entire crocodile skin from which you can then have items made to desire -- a cowboy belt? A wallet to your own secret design? Ski boots? One Tokyo department store (Seibu in Ikebukuro) runs an on-premise college for its customers and has one of the finest collections of cheeses youare likely to come across anywhere in the world.

- Rick Kennedy