BEAMS opens its 12th GATE STORE at Konpira Shrine, with pop-ups inside Sensoji and at Hakone Yumoto Station

BEAMS said it will open its twelfth permanent "GATE STORE" — a format built around regional crafts and local partners — on the stone approach to Konpira Shrine (金刀比羅宮) in Kotohira, Kagawa Prefecture, on October 31, according to a September 17 company release. It is one of three GATE STORE openings the retailer is staging within about five weeks of each other: a five-month pop-up inside Sensoji Temple's grounds in Asakusa, Tokyo, opened September 26, and a three-month pop-up at Hakone Yumoto Station follows on October 9.

The Kotohira store sits at the 46th step of the shrine's 785-step ascent to its main hall — a climb Konpira pilgrims have made since the Edo period — at 981 Kawanishi, Kotohira, and will be run by Deco Co. (株式会社デコ), a company that has operated BEAMS franchise stores around Kagawa Prefecture for many years, BEAMS said. Housed in a building that keeps the look of an old traditional house, the store will stock local crafts and goods carrying the area's own stories, and will lend visitors free bamboo walking sticks upcycled from bamboo no longer needed in Kotohira town, their handles finished in Kagawa lacquerware (香川漆器), a nationally designated traditional craft — a service aimed squarely at pilgrims and tourists making the climb.

In Asakusa, BEAMS has built a roughly 10-tsubo (about 33 square metre) store from four connected shipping containers on a new lawn plaza west of Sensoji's main hall, running from September 26 to February 28, 2027. It stocks products themed on Asakusa landmarks such as the Kaminarimon "Thunder Gate," alongside regional goods and food from across Japan aimed at souvenir-buying visitors, the company said.

At Hakone Yumoto Station, a 5.8-tsubo store in the ticket-gate-free concourse runs from October 9 to January 11, 2027, in partnership with Odakyu Hakone Group — the operator of the Hakone Tozan mountain railway, funicular, ropeway and Lake Ashi sightseeing cruises that already move visitors through the area — selling Hakone marquetry woodwork (寄木細工) and other local crafts, according to the release.

Staged together, the three openings read less as three separate store decisions than as one bet on where floor space earns its keep. A shrine stairway, a temple courtyard and a station concourse are all captive-traffic sites that funnel pilgrims and day-trippers past a fixed point regardless of the wider retail cycle, and each build here — a lightweight container structure, a small station-concourse unit, a shopfront on an existing shrine-approach street — commits a fraction of the capital a city-centre flagship would. Partnering with Deco in Kotohira and Odakyu Hakone Group at Yumoto also puts BEAMS inside another operator's built-in audience rather than building foot traffic from scratch. That the Kotohira store is BEAMS' twelfth of its kind, not its first, suggests the format has moved past experiment into a standing programme — one now expanding at Japan's pilgrimage and inbound-tourism choke points about as fast as at its city stores.