ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY CLAUDIA NEWELL

It's 11 p.m. at the Higashimatsubara train station in a residential area just outside Tokyo's Shibuya district. Weary commuters are pouring out of the station, making their way home. Despite the late hour, however, many of them are heading first for the blazing fluorescent oasis of the 7-Eleven on the corner. Some are there for the staples, picking up smokes, snacks, magazines or soft drinks. But just as many are choosing a late dinner from an array of bento boxes and onigiri rice balls delivered fresh only hours ago. Others are paying their bills, buying concert tickets or printing photos from their digital cameras. "The food selection is bigger than in most restaurants," says Naoko Koike, a 29-year-old apparel designer who does most of her banking at convenience stores. "I stop by here virtually every night. It's become a habit, a ritual."

All over the country, that same ritual plays out, at all hours of the day, on a truly massive scale. In the past three decades, the number of convenience stores in Japan has exploded. The country is now home to nearly 9,800 7-Elevens (compared with 5,700 in the U.S.) and a total of 40,000 convenience stores. Combini, as they are known, have become the neighborhood nexus in many urban communities, like the general store in small towns of old. They are where teenagers try to buy their first cigarettes, executives drop their golf bags for delivery to the course on Sunday, busy mothers pick up the laundry and 80-year-old grandmothers buy their buckwheat noodles instead of making them by hand. Masashi Toriyama, a 34-year-old systems engineer, treats his favorite Tokyo convenience store like a base of operations, a constant nearly as comforting as his home. "Sometimes I find myself going there three or four times a day," he says. Combini, he asserts, are not just places to shop, they are a way of life.

The successes of Sony, Toyota and Toshiba are famous the world over, shining examples of Japan's postwar economic revival. Less widely hailed but no less important is the rise of 7-Eleven, a company that is as much a business triumph as—and, possibly, an even bigger domestic cultural influence than—Japan's famed export manufacturers. Since launching in Japan in 1974, the retailer has, more than any other, changed the way the country shops and eats. "We never intended to have such an impact on Japanese society," says longtime 7-Eleven executive Minoru Matsumoto, "but in the end, that's what we did." As the biggest and best run of Japan's many Combini chains, 7-Eleven helped pioneer the convenience-store lifestyle that has become part of the fabric of Japanese society. Simultaneously, it has proved that innovators in even one of the country's most dysfunctional industries—retailing—can become world-class competitors.

Founded in 1927 in Dallas, Texas, 7-Eleven stores started out as a true-blue American invention. But a Japanese company led by a visionary took the concept and radically improved it. In the early 1970s, Toshifumi Suzuki, a young executive at Ito-Yokado, Japan's largest retailing conglomerate, ventured to the U.S. to inquire about franchising Denny's restaurants in Japan. While there, however, he was more impressed by the 7-Elevens he encountered, so he returned to Japan and brokered a licensing deal that allowed Ito-Yokado to open a chain of convenience stores under the 7-Eleven name. Today, he is Ito-Yokado's chairman and still runs 7-Eleven.

With its dense urban populations, cramped homes (and refrigerators), and small retail-store lots, Suzuki saw that Japan was ideally suited to the convenience-store format. Japanese customers instantly responded to these professionally managed stores, which were better stocked and open longer, yet were no higher priced, than the country's ubiquitous mom-and-pop shops.