Takashimaya pitches this year's gifts as an Asian food trip, with spending flat against inflation
Takashimaya is building its 2026 year-end gift catalogue around Korean, Taiwanese and Thai-style foods it is pitching as a passport-free Asian food trip, explicitly citing the weak yen and dearer oil as reasons shoppers are staying home -- but its own forecast average spend is flat on last year, which against roughly 2% consumer-price inflation means a similar basket this winter buys slightly less than it did in 2025.
Takashimaya Co., Ltd. (高島屋) said its 2026 winter gift campaign, "Takashimaya's Year-End Gifts" (高島屋のお歳暮), features a dedicated section called "An Asian Food Trip Without a Passport" (パスポートのいらない、アジアグルメ旅行), built around Korean, Taiwanese and Thai-style foods. The retailer explicitly frames the section against the weak yen and higher crude-oil prices, which it says are making overseas travel less accessible, positioning the gifts as a stand-in for a trip abroad rather than simply as food, according to the company's November 9 announcement.
Among the named items: an Indian-style chicken biryani at ¥6,264; a Korean-style two-type kimbap set at ¥3,942; a Taiwanese pineapple-cake assortment of ten pieces at ¥4,860; and a Kyushu-sourced gift assortment at ¥5,400. The online store takes orders from October 2 to December 24, with Kansai gift centres open since October 30 and Kanto's since November 4, at stores including Nihombashi, Shinjuku, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto, the company said.
Takashimaya forecasts an average in-store spend of about ¥4,200 this winter -- unchanged from last year -- on a catalogue of roughly 2,000 in-store items, also flat, with up to 3,800 items available online. About 1,200 items in its "Rose Gift" range ship free nationwide.
Both of those headline figures -- the ¥4,200 average spend and the roughly 2,000-item catalogue -- are flat in nominal terms. Japan's consumer prices were still up 1.9% year on year as of August, the most recent reading published by the Statistics Bureau, so a flat-yen gift basket this winter buys, by floortok's calculation, a little less than the same basket bought in 2025. The yen itself has kept weakening through the campaign's run-up: the dollar bought ¥157.97 in October 2026, according to the US Federal Reserve, roughly 4% more yen than the ¥151.35 it bought in October 2025, floortok's calculation shows. In our read, that same weaker yen cuts both ways on this campaign: it is the force Takashimaya blames for keeping shoppers' travel plans at home, and it is also what makes an imported Thai- or Taiwanese-sourced treat on the gift floor costlier to bring in -- even as the retailer holds its average ticket where it stood a year ago.
The pitch itself is a Product-side move rather than a pricing one: rather than discount against a cautious shopper, Takashimaya is repackaging imported, travel-coded foods as the next best thing to a holiday its customers are less likely to take this year. Whether that framing lifts the average spend above last year's flat figure, rather than merely holding it there, is the thing to watch once the retailer reports how this gift season actually sold.