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This is a lively, downtown hotel with a fancy new lobby and reception area, an attractive buzz in the upstairs restaurants and an outdoor pool for the summer. Being part of the ANA group, one of Japan’s leading airlines, keeps the folks rolling in. The hotel has a faithful clientele of Japanese and people who have felt better received here than at other, more snobbish, hostelries. It’s a short walk from the many delights of the Akasaka entertainment area.
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This is a well-run, efficient and clean hotel for those who don’t need the frills. Rooms are half the price of some upmarket places. It’s within 10 minutes’ walk of Roppongi Hills and all the joys of that part of town. Oddly, there aren’t many economy class hotels in the heart of the city that cater to foreigners.
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This little hotel is very close to the famous Roppongi Crossing and just up the street from Roppongi Hills. It’s a recently opened, no-frills, low-budget hotel that is clean and well run. Facing a busy street, it can be noisy, but that’s Roppongi for you. The solution is to keep the double-glazed windows closed. Downstairs there is one simple café and the main reception desk. However, they’re not as comfortable for Westerners as one would like.
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The Capitol Tokyu has the great merit of a fine location, with a grand Shinto shrine complex on one side and the spiffy new prime minister’s office—all glass and steel—on the other. The hotel has a long tradition of involvement in national politics. It also boasts a grill, the Keyaki Grill, which was long seen as the best in the city. These days the Keyaki is fighting to get its reputation back after a spell of neglect. The hotel is within striking distance of Akasaka, which is another plus.
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This is, without doubt, one of the most unusual hostelries ever to rise up in Japan. It’s actually a complex institution, in terms of the services it offers. Claska hosts fashion shows, and there’s an open-plan restaurant-cum-bar on the ground floor where interior designers and magazine people congregate. The upper floors are residential, and people stay there for a week or two or more. For a sense of where Japan is going—in design, movies and music—head out to Claska.
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The brand spanking new Conrad Tokyo is one of the hottest places to stay in town. Rooms are designed on a ‘city’ or ‘garden’ concept according to their views over the skyline or the Royal Hamarikyu garden and Tokyo Bay. Business travellers are well catered for with airport limousines, three banquet rooms and meeting rooms with the latest audiovisual and technical facilities. The wow factor is secured by having Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant on-site. After a hard day’s work, relax in the spa with 10 treatment rooms or work out in the fully equipped gym and aerobics studio.
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Count this as one of the most conveniently located and discreet hotels in the archipelago. That said, this is an [address] for intimate occasions, business or personal. The hotel is on the smaller scale and consists of a couple of floors in the middle of an office building, so there’s no grand entrance. The location allows for a last-minute dash to the bullet trains going west to Osaka and Nagoya.
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The Grand Hyatt opened in 2003, along with the whole of the Roppongi Hills complex. Just as the overall development by tycoon Minoru Mori has worked, so indeed the hotel at the heart of the new complex is proving to be a winner. Cheesy aspects of the place, and a rather inconvenient lobby, can be overlooked in favour of the fact that this is now, quite suddenly, the most fashionable hotel in the city. Service has improved recently and management is confident.
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This hotel was planned during the Bubble years, and it has the imprint of that era, when Japanese money ruled the world and to be grandiose was normal. This is a big, burly hotel, with enormous reaches of empty space downstairs and a lively trade in couples coming in for the weekend— over the Rainbow Bridge. Odaiba is popular with Tokyoites, and close by is the head office of Fuji TV. But for out-of-town Westerners, the Grand Pacific Meridien is distinctly off the beaten track.
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Yokohama city centre is one hour from Tokyo, and the harbour city offers a totally different atmosphere. Spend a weekend there, sampling its museums, boulevards and open seafront—and stay at this ancient hotel. The New Grand Yokohama has its share of memories, dating back to the 1920s. General Douglas MacArthur stayed in the hotel at the outset of his long tour of post-Second World War duty. > Hotel New Otani
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This huge, rambling hotel was built at the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, and it has a very large garden with pools and goldfish and waterfalls. The New Otani is run in style and boasts big conference rooms downstairs. It attracts a lot of people to its hilltop location—its original revolving rooftop restaurant still functions, giving the cocktail-hour customers a changing view of the city. This is a place for discreet business meetings.
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After 43 years of history, Tokyo’s oldest and most venerable hotel—still with one of the greatest lobbies in the world—faces the shifting sands of the hotel business with confidence. The Okura is tied in with the US Embassy across the road and it serves as a port of call for visiting heads of state and government. It is also very attractive to the Japanese, who flock to its restaurants and bars, which are among the most prestigious in Tokyo. That said, the overall atmosphere—the guest rooms— isn’t what it once was.
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The Hotel Villa Fantaine is located on top of the Roppongi 1-chome subway station and is owned by Sumitomo, one of the major realty groups in Tokyo. It’s a quiet, well-run hotel set up to serve international businessmen. Services are minimal—there is a space used for breakfast, but no actual restaurant in the building and no bar. A pool and a gym are available in a nearby sports club, for a charge. Rooms are small, as you’d expect with a low-budget hotel, and there are no views to speak of. The hotel is seven minutes’ walk from Roppongi Crossing and all its attendant nightlife.
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big banks’ headquarters in Otemachi. The Palace boasts a decent bar at the top, with a view of the moated plaza and its black pines.
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The movie that put this hotel on the map, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, hasn’t actually done it any favours. People feel they know these hushed corridors, quietly hissing lifts and uniformed staff, and they want something a shade more lively than this oh-so-accurately-observed hostelry. The view of Mount Fuji from the New York Bar is still what it was, stunning, and the celebs keep coming. But increasingly the centre of gravity in Tokyo is Roppongi. The management has a challenge.
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For anyone visiting the Tokyo head office of Honda, and on a tight budget, this is the perfect hotel. It’s two steps from the car company’s main showroom and offices. The hotel boasts none of the facilities that might boost the prices of its rooms, so it’s the kind of no-frills facility that might have appealed to Sochiro Honda—the founder of the company favoured austerity and the simple life. That said, there’s a convivial restaurant-cum-bar on the ground floor.
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Thanks to its vigorous management (it’s owned by Mitsubishi), this hotel has pulled itself up from obscurity a few years ago to become one of the most popular hostelries in town for visiting businessmen, Japanese and Western alike. Its location, close to the Hakozaki downtown air terminal and only a few minutes from the Tokyo Stock Market, has helped to pave the way for its rise. Stay here and you can hop on to an early morning bus one minute away to rush out to the airport. Perfect for departures.
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This smaller, highly elegant hotel was set up by Seiji Tsutsumi, a poet-businessman, back in his halcyon years in the 1970s when he got the idea that the fabled Ginza district should boast at least one hotel right in the middle of the action. This is not necessarily an advantage in an age when young people in Tokyo—who are the trend-setters—head for other parts of town, such as Roppongi, Nishi Azabu and Shibuya. Management has a fight on its hands to recapture the glitter of its early years.
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The Imperial is an historic [name] in the hotel business in Tokyo. The original Frank Lloyd Wright building was torn down in 1968 and replaced with a rather soulless structure overlooking Hibiya Park. It’s probably the best place to stage a banquet or a giant convention. The hotel has an array of restaurants, one of the most attractive small bars in the city and gives easy access to the Ginza, one minute away. Watch out for the rebuilt main lobby, replacing a much criticised design that resembled a train station.
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This is a perfect spot for Westerners who cruise into Tokyo with limited time and want to get to the heart of things quickly. At the same time it offers more independence than a hotel. The Mansions at Roppongi is perhaps the forerunner of many such facilities to come. As such, it merits close watching. The rooms are clean and the service immaculate. Everything is safe, without the managers being intrusive. And, yes, you are in Roppongi!
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This is the only hotel in Tokyo with two [name]s, one in Japanese and one in English, and it has, in fact, two faces. On the one hand it is a writers’ hotel for the Japanese clients, who favour its No No Bar. On the other it’s a great location for visiting foreigners who want to be close to Jimbocho and Kanda, the second-hand bookshop centres. All in all, it’s more like a Parisian Left Bank hotel than anything else. Its hilltop location, set back from a busy main street, is blessedly quiet.
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