Workers at one of Tokyo’s most famous department stores are to shatter tradition and go on strike for the first time since the 1950s, reports The Financial Times. Customers of the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro were warned on its website that the shop would be closed all day on Thursday last week, owing to industrial action timed to disrupt a series of upmarket in-store autumnal promotions of seasonal fashion, accessories and beauty products. The strike, involving as many as 900 workers, is being held in protest against plans by the department store’s owner, 7&i Holdings, to sell the 10-store Sogo & Seibu chain to the US investment fund Fortress. Workers fear that the estimated $1.5 billion sale, which would involve combining the flagship Ikebukuro store with a prominent electronics retailer, Yodobashi Camera, will ultimately cost them their jobs.

Japanese department store workers are performers of functions that include welcoming customers into the lifts and maintaining absolute spotless surfaces, and have not held a full-day strike at a large outlet for more than 60 years. Their reluctance to take action is part of a decline in the number of strikes in Japan since the mid-1970s.

The strike is the culmination of a dispute lasting several months between the Sogo & Seibu labour union and the management of 7&i, with the company having come under sustained pressure from the US-based activist investor ValueAct to divest non-core businesses. A union representative told the Financial Times that its members’ decision to go ahead with the strike followed an understanding that, despite its efforts to talk 7&i out of the sale, the deal would go ahead as planned.