In 1932, a five-story department store with an elevator was a genuine novelty in Taiwan. Hayashi Department Store opened its doors in Tainan City, Tainan Prefecture, during the height of Japanese colonial investment in the island's commercial infrastructure. The store was named for its Japanese founders and designed to bring the department store experience — the kind Osaka and Tokyo shoppers had known for decades — to the southern Taiwanese market. Customers could browse goods across five floors, ride an elevator, and take in views of the surrounding city from an observation deck. For a generation of Tainan residents, the Five-story Building was a landmark as much as a shop: the tallest structure many of them had ever entered, a symbol of what the colonial city was becoming.

The building did not survive the war intact. In the final months of World War II, American aircraft bombed Tainan as part of the broader air campaign against Japanese-held Taiwan. The Hayashi Department Store was hit. Exactly how severely the building was damaged is part of the postwar memory of the structure — it stood, but it no longer functioned as a department store. For decades afterward, the building passed through various uses and states of partial neglect, its five stories still recognizable from the street but stripped of the energy and commerce that had defined it. Tainan's older residents remembered what it had been. The building waited.

Restoration work began in 2006, a years-long project of structural repair, historical research, and architectural reconstruction. The goal was not to turn the building into a museum of itself but to return it to something like its original function — a working commercial building that preserved the aesthetic language of 1930s Japanese colonial commercial architecture. The project required navigating both the physical challenges of restoring a wartime-damaged structure and the historical questions of what the original looked like in detail. Eight years of work culminated on June 14, 2014, when then-Tainan Mayor William Lai presided over the official reopening. The building was alive again.

Today the Hayashi Department Store sells contemporary goods alongside curated displays of local culture. The top floor hosts exhibitions on local farming traditions and handicrafts — the agricultural heritage of the Tainan plain that existed long before department stores arrived. A Western-style cafeteria and an observation deck complete the picture, offering views across a city that has grown enormously since 1932. The original elevator has been restored. Visitors who step into it are doing what Tainan residents did in an age when such things were extraordinary — ascending through a building that was once the tallest place in town, in a city that was already very old before it was ever modern.