Tokyo / Online
Ginza-born luxury skincare house since 1956 — the milk-first philosophy and hand-delivered counter service that made it a quiet giant of Japanese beauty.
Best for Japanese luxury skincare and the milk-first ritual.
Craft guide
The Gourmet & Pantry in Tokyo Issue
ORBISGOURMET & PANTRY IN TOKYO4 shops in the atlas.Illustration
Gourmet & Pantry in Tokyo
4 stores · curated ORBIS register
Visit official site ↗Children of the Discordance
Hidden GemTokyo / Online
Children of the Discordance was founded in Tokyo in 2011 by Hideaki Shikama after his tenure designing for SHIPS, reflecting a deliberate decision to work independently and on his own terms rather than accommodate seasonal commercial cycles.
Best for Bandana patchwork
Children of the Discordance was founded in Tokyo in 2011 by Hideaki Shikama after his tenure designing for SHIPS, reflecting a deliberate decision to work independently and on his own terms rather than accommodate seasonal commercial cycles. The brand's signature methodology transforms vintage textiles—particularly bandanas inherited from Shikama's childhood collections—into contemporary streetwear through patchwork construction and meticulous reweaving. Scarves, bandanas, and denim are disassembled and reconstructed into shirts, outerwear, and accessories, each piece unique and bearing the marks of its source material's previous life. The aesthetic draws from the Nippori neighborhood (downtown Tokyo), employing traditional Japanese techniques alongside contemporary tailoring. Shikama won the Tokyo Fashion Award in 2018, bringing international recognition to his work and establishing the brand within global fashion discourse. Collections utilize updated and upcycled materials sourced from Shikama's personal archive and worldwide vintage sourcing across his lifetime, drawing visual and cultural reference from 1990s onward fashion, music, and counterculture movements. Each piece reflects a philosophy that clothing should endure lifelong rather than cycle through seasons.
Visit official site ↗Ginza Kimuraya (銀座木村家 / 木村屋總本店)
Heritage HouseGinza, Tokyo / Japan
Ginza Kimuraya traces its origin to 1869, when a former samurai left unemployed by the Meiji Restoration, Yasubei Kimura, met a baker who had trained under a Dutch resident of Nagasaki's Dejima trading post and opened a Western-style bread shop, first called Bun'eido and renamed Kimuraya the following year.
Best for The birthplace of anpan, baking in Ginza since 1869
Ginza Kimuraya traces its origin to 1869, when a former samurai left unemployed by the Meiji Restoration, Yasubei Kimura, met a baker who had trained under a Dutch resident of Nagasaki's Dejima trading post and opened a Western-style bread shop, first called Bun'eido and renamed Kimuraya the following year. In 1874, Kimura and his son Eizaburo adapted the sake-yeast starter used for a steamed bun called sakamanju to leaven bread in a way suited to Japanese palates — the company's own history dates the result, anpan, a bun filled with sweetened azuki bean paste, to that year.
The bun's reputation was made the following spring. On April 4, 1875, Kimura presented Emperor Meiji with a sakura anpan studded with a salted cherry blossom sourced from Yoshino, and the emperor and Empress Shoken reportedly asked that it continue to be served to them afterward — the same date is now marked in Japan as Anpan Day, and Kimuraya's own corporate history page recounts the audience and the flower detail directly.
The Ginza flagship still occupies a multi-floor building at 4-5-7 Ginza: a bakery on the ground floor, a café upstairs, and a Western-style grill above that, run today as a roughly 95-employee company making close to 130 products, some of them seasonal. By its own and outside accounts it remains Japan's oldest Western-style bakery still trading under a name it chose for itself in 1870.
Visit official site ↗Asakusa, Tokyo / Japan
Pelican Bakery has operated from the same corner of Tokyo's Asakusa district since 1942, when founder Takeo Watanabe opened what began as a general bread shop, Watanabe Bakery, in the Tawaramachi neighborhood.
Best for Tokyo's two-item shokupan bakery, unchanged since 1942
Pelican Bakery has operated from the same corner of Tokyo's Asakusa district since 1942, when founder Takeo Watanabe opened what began as a general bread shop, Watanabe Bakery, in the Tawaramachi neighborhood. Over the decades the shop narrowed its own menu rather than expanding it, arriving at the discipline that still defines it today: the bakery's own site states plainly that Pelican sells only two items, shokupan sandwich loaf and dinner rolls — nothing else.
That restriction is the point, not a limitation. Pelican describes its guiding aim as bread meant to be eaten every day without ever growing tiresome, and has kept its recipe essentially unchanged across generations so the loaf tastes the same to a customer's grandchildren as it did to their grandparents. The bakery is one of Tokyo's reference points for shokupan, the fluffy milk-bread loaf that has become a genre of its own in Japanese baking, and its rolls and loaves routinely sell out well before closing.
The shop still stands at 4-7-4 Kotobuki, Taito-ku, open 9:00-17:00 and closed Sundays and national holidays; a related Pelican Café a few doors away serves the same bread as toast, thick-cut and unadorned. No espresso program, no seasonal flavors, no line extensions — just the original two items, baked fresh and sold until they run out, as they have been since 1942.
Visit official site ↗