By YOKO MASUDA/ Staff Writer
June 19, 2023 at 07:00 JST
The H&M Ginza Namiki Street store in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward (Yoko Masuda)
After five years, major casual clothing chain H&M has returned to the Ginza district in Tokyo's Chuo Ward to re-establish a presence there and attract new customers.
The Swedish retailer opened a new store on Namiki Street in Ginza on May 11.
On opening day, Aneta Pokucinska, president of H&M Japan, said that with the COVID-19 pandemic leveling off and the return of shoppers to Ginza, the company determined that this was “the right time” to come back to the district.
She also said that the company’s sales in Japan are returning to pre-COVID levels, adding that it plans to open more stores in the country.
H&M opened its first store in Japan in Ginza in 2008 but closed it in 2018.
The new store is H&M’s first shop in Japan with a takeout cafe on the first floor. The store occupies the first to third floors in a building on the street.
Total floor space is around 1,300 square meters.
Along with the usual male and female clothing lines, the store sells furniture and homewares, the first H&M shop to do so in Japan, as the company had previously sold such items only online in the country.
The first H&M store in Japan was located on Chuo Street in Ginza.
But it closed in 2018 as the opening the year before of Ginza Six, a luxury shopping complex, changed the flow of pedestrian traffic in the neighborhood.
This time, the company opened the new store in another site in the district.
The store sells carefully selected items such as those produced in a collaboration between H&M and other well-known fashion brands.
Ginza, which is known as a high-end shopping district, has seen the opening of more accessible shops since last year, including affordable-priced clothing stores or the so-called “100-yen shops.”
Uniqlo and MUJI, retailers of affordable clothing and other items, have opened flagship stores in Ginza.
That demonstrates that retailers in the district have been split into two groups: luxurious stores and affordable shops, with a few in the middle range.
Forever 21 brand to shed image of ‘fast fashion’ as it returns to Japan
February 22, 2023
Uniqlo restores old clothes with Japanese hand sewing technique
October 4, 2022
New Moomin store in Tokyo’s Ginza district offers 1,100 items
February 8, 2023
Rolexes worth 250 million yen recovered after Ginza robbery
May 11, 2023
Teens arrested after robbery in plain sight in Tokyo’s Ginza
May 9, 2023
A peek through the music industry’s curtain at the producers who harnessed social media to help their idols go global.
A series based on diplomatic documents declassified by Japan’s Foreign Ministry
Here is a collection of first-hand accounts by “hibakusha” atomic bomb survivors.
Cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.
A series about Japanese-Americans and their memories of World War II
