The plan, according to what I’d read, was to build an integrated development that was a sort of all-in-one live, work and play environment. That's the sort of concept you tend to associate with developers with a tendency towards self-promotion, but given the list of financial and IT businesses who’ve moved into the office space (including Barclays Capital, Ferrari Japan, Goldman Sachs, Time Inc., BP, Google and the Pokémon Company) you’d assume a degree of desirability when it comes to high-powered and highly-paid executives,
We’d already had lunch, and we weren’t there for the shopping, heading more or less straight for the upper levels of the 54-storey Mori Tower, where we had an appointment with the Tokyo City View. I don’t have a great head for heights, so I wasn’t keen on shelling the extra ¥500 that’d get us onto the open air Sky Deck on the top level once we’d paid ¥1500 for the basic package.
That package included admission to the Moro Art Museum, something I wasn’t keen on given the fact that the major exhibition on display featured The Art of Peanuts.
Once we’d taken in the views, and I’d sneaked in a Trappist ale, we headed into the art gallery to check out the regular exhibition that focused on new artistic ideas from around the world, allegedly keeping the art accessible to the general public, rather than making it overly obscure or esoteric. That may be much the same territory as MONA in Hobart, where we’d been in the recent past, but I have to admit that this particular display didn't do a whole lot for me.
Back downstairs, we crossed the road and headed back to the hotel, where after ten minutes the room looked as if it had been the target of a major panty raid. Actually, it would probably have made a decent display piece in the Art Museum if we'd been able to come up with a suitably postmodern metaphor for airing not quite dry laundry.
Madam had a six o'clock appointment with an old friend from University days but left at five. I walked her down as far as the Oyster Bar, stopped there for four of Japan's best prime oysters and a Yebisu, and popped into the nearby gourmet provedore on the way back to pick up a half bottle of nondescript 2011 Bordeaux (¥925, and you get what you paid for).
Back at the hotel, I had half an hour upstairs, then headed back down to the restaurant for dinner (pasta con vongole bianco with a glass of prosecco) and rocked off for Night Two, where the show was, again, highly enjoyable.
Back in the room just after ten-thirty Madam had news of spectacular Christmas lights, and I took my time typing up the night’s set list and sipping on a French red wine that was OK. As I said, you get what you pay for, and when you haven't paid much you tend not to have great expectations.
And so to bed…