We headed back out for a walk around Roppongi and given a choice between significant commercial developments at Roppongi Hills and Tokyo Midtown, headed for the latter with a view to calling in to t’other on the way back. Click on that Tokyo Midtown link and you’ll possibly conclude we’re talking shopping centres here, but Tokyo Midtown is a $3 billion (¥370 billion) mixed-use development with more than half a million square metres of floor space on a 78000 m² (19.4 acres) site formerly occupied by the Japan Defense Agency.
Completed in March 2007, we’re talking a mixture office, residential, commercial, hotel, and leisure space, the tallest office building in Tokyo (the 248 metre Midtown Tower) and the new location of the Suntory Museum of Art.
So it’s not just a shopping centre, though there’s plenty of high-end shopping action available in the five-floor Galleria complex, along with a variety of restaurants and a wine bar (Coppola's Vinoteca) dedicated to the wines of Francis Ford Coppola.
Office space tenants includes Fujifilm, Fuji Xerox, Yahoo! Japan and international law firms, as well as a medical clinic affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The 250-room Ritz-Carlton Hotel occupies the 47th through 53rd floors of Midtown Tower, complete with a $20,000 per night Presidential Suite and an authentic 200-year-old Japanese teahouse.
And if you’re after a little peace and quiet after you’ve given the credit card a thorough working over, the complex includes Hinokichō, formerly a private garden attached to an Edo Period villa, reopened as a public park, and the cherry tree-lined Midtown Garden.
Less than a kilometre away, the older, but similarly scaled Roppongi Hills complex offers more of the same.
But we weren’t there for the shopping. Madam was scoping the place out before an evening rendezvous with an old friend, and Hughesy was up for something along the lines of lunch. After a week on the road, I didn’t need something substantial. The lunch venue was a matter of some debate, hardly surprising when you consider the range of options, but we ended up at an Italian eatery where mozzarella was the main focus.
Lunch, as it turned out, was a fairly basic pizza and a panini with glasses of red and white that did the job quite nicely, and from there we wandered back towards Roppongi Hills.
Like the place we’d just left, you can throw in some pretty impressive statistics about Roppongi Hills. It’s older (opened in 2003), slightly larger (27 acres or 109,000m²), and slightly more expensive, constructed at a cost of $4 billion on more than four hundred separate lots amalgamated by property tycoon Minoru Mori.