arising from the meiji restoration, the company was founded in 1869 in yokohama as tsuruya, a store selling cotton for kimono. in 1889, it bought imagawa matsuya, a tokyo kimono fabric store founded in 1776, and adopted the latter's name because of its historic lineage. it opened a three-story western-style store in 1907, and a modern department store in 1925 in ginza.