MITSUKOSHI is coming to Manila with its signature Japanese culture and a unique design

What is it about Japan that makes us fall in love deeper with each visit? It’s impossible to pick one reason—it’s all the traditions, the little niceties in their way of life, the cherry blossoms, the food plated so beautifully, and its natural surroundings and built heritage.
For me and fellow design enthusiasts, it is the Japanese aesthetic that encapsulates all the beautiful things about Japan and its people.
You can be walking in Tokyo surrounded by tall, modern buildings and cross a torii gate into an ancient Shinto shrine. You can be looking at a delicate Japanese scroll one minute and a train ride away is a museum where the world’s greatest artworks are splashed digitally across all surfaces, including your own body. You can be in a supermarket that’s selling a square watermelon costing P30,000 or at Donki filling up two suitcases with Japanese snacks for the same amount.
And since we can’t all live in Japan, a venerable piece of the country is coming to Manila: MITSUKOSHI, a shopping mall which will be launched by the oldest department store in Japan, founded in 1673 as a kimono seller.
In the streets of Ginza and Nihombashi in Tokyo, the red banners of MITSUKOSHI Department Store assure you that you’re in for a visual and cultural treat as a foreigner, which of course is “ordinary” for locals who experience it in their daily lives. (Yes, we’re suffering from quotidian envy.)
Inside a MITSUKOSHI Department Store in Japan, the contrasts, textures and stories of tradition and modernity, luxury and everyday are incredibly balanced.
Japanese cosmetics brands alongside global luxury bags, and in the depachika or the basement level, the supermarket with its concessionaires of bakers and sushi masters that make and package their food artfully.
The spaces and products inside MITSUKOSHI are always something that inspire awe—if not downright desire to just swipe your plastic till you drop.
Read more: The Philippine Star Life