What Matsuya Ginza is known for

Trading since 1869 and on Ginza since 1925, Matsuya is the design-minded one of the great Tokyo stores — its Design Collection floor a pilgrimage, its depachika a museum of edible craft.

Matsuya Ginza is a department store on Ginza 3-chome in Tokyo, opened on May 1, 1925, two years after the Great Kanto Earthquake. The company traces itself to 1869. That year Tokubei Furuya, born in Yamanashi Prefecture, founded the Tsuruya Kimono Store at Ishikawaguchi in Yokohama after his wife Masu found a ready market for scraps of cloth. In 1889 the firm acquired the Matsuya Kimono Store at Imagawabashi in Kanda and opened in Tokyo the following year. In 1907 it raised a three-storey Western building there. The Ginza store's Central Hall, now called the Space of Ginza, opened to the ceiling with circular stained glass and a floor of black and white marble. A Ryuko Fudoson shrine from Koyasan Ryukoin Temple in Wakayama still stands on the roof. The occupying forces requisitioned the building in 1945. The store reopened in 1953 after the requisition was lifted. A 1964 expansion took the store across a whole block, and a 2001 renewal changed its colour from blue to white. The seventh-floor Design Collection was renewed in 2011. In 2019 the company adopted the phrase Design no Matsuya and marked 150 years. Matsuya Ginza reached its centenary on the site in 2025, marked by an exhibition on 100 years of footprints.