Bags and shoes led July's department-store gains, while the Nagoya region fell for a fifth month
METI's final July figures put department-store sales up 4.3% on the year, but the growth sits in the lines the inbound shopper buys — accessories up 9.4%, clothing up 5.6% — while the depachika is flat and Kanto carries a recovery that has not reached Nagoya.
Japan's department stores sold ¥534.6bn of goods in July, 4.3% more than a year earlier, according to the final figures of METI's Current Survey of Commerce published on 15 September. That is the third-strongest month of 2026, behind May's 7.6% and April's 4.5%, but it comes against a soft base: July 2025 was down 6.6% on the year as Chinese spending fell away. The more useful reading is in the product split METI publishes with the final release, which floortok now carries in its Market Data room, because the growth sits almost entirely in the lines the inbound shopper buys.
Accessories — the 身の回り品 line, which METI defines as bags, footwear and other personal goods, and the closest official proxy for the leather-goods counters — rose 9.4% to ¥90.2bn, the strongest of the three big lines and the fourth month running above 6% (April +9.2%, May +16.3%, June +6.6%). Clothing rose 5.6% to ¥221.1bn. Food, the depachika (the basement food hall) that anchors domestic footfall, slipped 0.5% to ¥144.8bn after a 3.5% fall in June. The mix moved with it: accessories were 16.9% of July's takings against 16.1% a year earlier, while food's share fell from 28.4% to 27.1%.
% change year on year
Who is buying
METI does not separate tax-free from domestic tickets inside a product line, so the split cannot say outright that visitors drove the accessories number. The arrivals data points that way. JNTO's August count, published on 16 September, put South Korean arrivals up 28.7% at 850,500, Hong Kong up 9.4% and Taiwan up 7.3%, even as Chinese arrivals fell 59.0%, a drop JNTO attributed to a Chinese government advisory against travel to Japan. Those visitors also arrived with more yen in hand: the won bought ¥11.32 per 100 in August against ¥10.62 a year earlier, and the Hong Kong dollar ¥20.25 against ¥18.84, on the Federal Reserve's monthly averages. In our view that is the pattern behind July's floor — fewer Chinese tour groups, more Korean, Taiwanese and Hong Kong individual travellers with a favourable rate, whose purchases land in bags and shoes before they land in the food hall.
Tokyo carries it; Nagoya does not
The regional split, also new to floortok's Market Data, shows where the recovery is. METI's Kanto bureau, which covers Tokyo and its neighbouring prefectures, sold ¥246.2bn, 46% of the national total, and grew 6.9% — the fastest of the four large regions. Kinki (Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe) rose 4.8% to ¥152.4bn and Kyushu with Okinawa 4.6% to ¥43.5bn. Chubu, the Nagoya region, fell 8.4% to ¥41.0bn: its fifth consecutive monthly decline, after −3.6% in March, −3.8% in April, −1.2% in May and −9.0% in June, and a reversal from +13.2% in February.
% change year on year
METI's table gives the figure, not the reason. The Chubu panel is small — ¥41bn a month against Kanto's ¥246bn — so a single large store's works can move the line, and the region's biggest floors are mid-project: JR Nagoya Takashimaya's food-hall rebuild reached its fourth phase this week, and in our view a rebuild of that scale takes selling space out of the count while it runs. Whether the decline is a renovation effect or a demand one will only be clear once those floors reopen; until then the Nagoya number is the one to watch rather than the one to explain.
% change year on year
What to watch
For a maison or a floor operator the lesson of July is that the lever is product, not promotion: the lines that grew are the concession lines, while the food hall that generates the traffic is not generating the growth. Two dates settle whether the pattern holds. METI's preliminary August figure lands on 30 September and will show whether the Korean and Hong Kong surge fed the accessories line in the month it happened. Then on 1 November Japan moves tax-free shopping to a refund system, under which visitors pay the tax at the till and claim it back at departure — the first time the counter will charge first and refund later, and a change every operator will be watching in the tax-free queue. If August's accessories line holds high single digits with Chinese arrivals down 59%, the floor has found its replacement customer; if it does not, July was a base effect.