Kiyoko Niwasaki, president and CEO of Wako, hopes six months in the French capital will introduce the Ginza institution to a new audience — and help shape its international plans.

Last year, buoyed by the response of a two-week pop-up exhibition around tea and fragrance at the Japanese department store, the elegant Parisian eatery’s founder Shinichiro Ogata and Kiyoko Niwasaki, president and chief executive officer of the retailer, decided to celebrate.

“It was over that dinner that the idea for the [Paris] pop-up began to take concrete shape,” she recalled.

As a result, Ogata is returning the favor by hosting Wako for a six-month residency that ends April 30, taking a portion of the Parisian restaurant’s ground floor.

“We felt that a short event lasting only a few days would not be enough,” Niwasaki told WWD. “We [are] convinced that a full six months, long enough to experience the changing of the seasons, would allow us to become a natural part of local daily life” and allow visitors time to understand the retail company’s “very existence.”

The offering brings together Japanese crafts and contemporary design, spanning bamboo works, ceramics, lacquerware and tea ceremony objects, such as the contemporary take of designer Yosuke Fujii.

Ceramics and lacquer will also be well represented with bold forms shaped with clay and fire by Kai Tsujimura and Kansai Noguchi’s use of metallic powders and mother-of-pearl inlay on lacquer pieces.

Early in the new year, the department store ’s in-house Pure Craft ready-to-wear line and Suiha bags will join the selection, timed to coincide with Paris Fashion Week in January, in an approach the CEO described as “culture to be worn.”

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