Matsuya Ginza opens a pop-culture museum annex, betting on content over merchandise

Matsuya Ginza said in a release dated July 2026 that it will open a new three-floor annex called Matsuya Ginza Namiki-dori-kan on 5 September, anchored by a compact museum devoted to anime, manga and games.

The annex occupies floors one through three of a separate building on Ginza's Namiki-dori, according to the release. The museum, called Ginza Mirai Museum and nicknamed "Ginmira," opens first, taking the second floor as a roughly 316-square-metre exhibition hall and the third floor for a 117-square-metre retail area plus a 188-square-metre collaboration café run with LTR Co., which Matsuya describes as Japan's largest operator of themed collaboration cafés. agnès b. follows on the ground floor on 9 October. Three exhibitions are already scheduled: a Heaven Official's Blessing anime show from 5 to 29 September, a NO.6 exhibition from 2 to 26 October, and a joint Guilty Crown/Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress show from 30 October to 23 November. Matsuya said it plans roughly ten such exhibitions a year, smaller in scale than the large-format shows it already runs on the eighth floor of its main Ginza store.

Matsuya has been building this business since 2018, when it turned a department that had organised cultural events into a formal division, and its practice of packaging Ginza-originated exhibitions into travelling shows that tour nationally has grown to around 80 touring exhibitions in fiscal 2025, according to the release. The company put content-business sales at ¥5.0 billion in fiscal 2023, ¥5.6 billion in fiscal 2024 and ¥6.2 billion in fiscal 2025, and said it is targeting ¥7.0 billion in fiscal 2029, citing the new museum as one pillar of that growth.

For a legacy department store, this is a bet that content, not merchandise, is the more defensible growth line. A dedicated museum inside a Ginza annex costs real estate and staffing that a rotating eighth-floor event hall does not, but it gives Matsuya a fixed, bookable venue to run exhibitions year-round rather than around the main store's broader events calendar, and one built specifically to draw the Gen Z and inbound visitors increasingly the ones spending on anime and game-related goods. It also gives Matsuya a growth line less tied to merchandise, at a time when Japan's department-store sector overall still leans on inbound and gift spending to offset a shrinking, ageing core domestic shopper base.