SUPER ART & CRAFT MARKET takes over Tokyo Midtown Hibiya for its first standalone edition
Avex, BEAMS Creative and Mitsui Fudosan are giving a market that has run inside someone else's festival for two years its own three-day edition, taking over Tokyo Midtown Hibiya's underground arcade in November — the latest sign of Mitsui Fudosan building cultural programming into the complex's retail mix.
Avex Creator Agency, BEAMS's events subsidiary Beams Creative, and Mitsui Fudosan said in a joint release dated October 5 that their SUPER ART & CRAFT MARKET (SACM) will hold its first standalone edition this November, taking over the underground arcade at Tokyo Midtown Hibiya.
SACM has run for two consecutive years as a strand inside the Avex-organised MEET YOUR ART FESTIVAL; this will be its first outing as its own event. The companies set the dates for November 13 to 15 — a Friday evening session from 6pm to 9pm, then full days from 11am on the Saturday and Sunday — with roughly 40 shops and creators planned across art, craft, and food and drink, and free admission throughout.
The organisers are pitching the event under the theme "NEW RITUALS," describing it as proposing new habits to build into future living through art, craft, and food and drink, with a "contemporary craftsmanship" concept built around reinterpreting Japanese aesthetics and regional techniques through a modern sensibility. Beams Creative's role, the release said, is business production, drawing on its parent company's established network across art, music and craft culture.
The venue is as much the story as the market itself. Mitsui Fudosan has been steadily building cultural programming into Tokyo Midtown Hibiya's retail mix — it reopened a dedicated, roughly 1,200-square-metre art venue inside the complex this September — and handing its underground arcade to a three-day, 40-vendor market applies the same logic to a passage shoppers already walk through, rather than a room they pay to enter: a low-cost way to manufacture a reason to visit beyond the shops already on the floor.
Whether SACM becomes an annual fixture at Midtown Hibiya, the way it had at the Avex festival, will depend on whether a free underground market can draw the kind of weekend footfall Mitsui Fudosan is clearly trying to engineer.