The Tokyo Creative Salon (TCS) Executive Committee has announced the upcoming Tokyo Creative Salon 2026 (TCS2026), Japan's largest creative festival, to be held from Friday, March 13th to Sunday, March 22nd, 2026.
Entering its seventh year, TCS2026 will take place across nine major areas of Tokyo viz., Marunouchi, Nihonbashi, Ginza, Akasaka, Roppongi, Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku and Haneda; and will be free and open to the public.
Since its launch in 2020, Tokyo Creative Salon has evolved into a city-wide creative week originating from Tokyo, bringing together fashion, design, art, craft and technology during the cherry blossom season. By using the city itself as a stage, the festival has attracted wide attention both domestically and internationally, welcoming over 1.25 million visitors in its most recent edition.
The theme for 2026 is "Future Vintage." TCS2026 explores how memories, culture and creative expressions accumulated within the city can be reinterpreted through contemporary sensibilities and carried forward into the future. The festival aims to present expressions that will continue to resonate across generations, from Tokyo to the world.
Hiroshi Ohnishi, Chairman of TCS2026 commented, "Across the world, cities are strengthening their cultural value by bringing creators and communities together. Tokyo Creative Salon is an initiative to showcase Japan's world-class creativity with Tokyo as the stage. Under the theme 'Future Vintage,' we seek to connect the city's accumulated culture and memories to expressions that resonate into the future."
Satoshi Sugiyama, Executive Director, TCS2026 added, "Tokyo is a city where layers of creativity have been built up over time through people, places, and diverse cultural influences. With Tokyo Creative Salon, we reinterpret these layers through contemporary perspectives and transform the city itself into a space for creative expression. 'Future Vintage' reflects our intention to revisit the memories embedded in Tokyo and shape new forms of creativity that will be carried forward into the future."
Perspective
Living spaces have repositories of cultural memories spanning histories and contemporary times. These memories juxtapose themselves to reconstruct a living space as a cultural lived experience. A festival can be venue for presentation of the spectacles of these cultural memories. These narratives can be transmitted forward to the younger generations. From the next layer of narration, these memories can be reconstructed into new meanings. In order to decode the layers of cultural memories and their historical meanings, the message has to carry within itself the composite cultural layers of memory.