ROPPONGI HILLS

Roppongi Hills

(六本木ヒルズ). 6-10-1 Roppongi (Hibiya line, Roppongi station, exit 1C; Oedo line, Roppongi station, exit 3), 03-6406-6000.
Roppongi Hills is an expansive shopping and entertainment complex, sleek and modern, it opened with much fanfare and remains popular. It has a number of attractions centered around the 53-story Mori Tower:

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Roppongi Spider outside Roppongi Hills

Roppongi Hills (Japanese: 六本木ヒルズ) is one of Japan's largest integrated property developments, located in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.

Built by building tycoon Minoru Mori, the mega-complex incorporates office space, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafés, movie theatres, a museum, a hotel, a major TV studio, an outdoor amphitheatre, and a few parks. The centrepiece is the 54-story eponymous Mori Tower. Mori's stated vision was to build an integrated development where high-rise inner-urban communities allow people to live, work, play, and shop in close proximity to eliminate commuting time. He argued this would increase leisure time, quality of life, and benefit Japan's national competitiveness. Seventeen years in the making, the complex opened to the public on April 23, 2003.

Roppongi Hills, Tokyo

The development
The complex includes a 54-story high-rise building which stands 238 m tall, 793 luxurious and very expensive residential apartments, an art museum, a cinema complex, restaurants, cafes, stores, the offices of Goldman Sachs, TV Asahi, J-WAVE, Rakuten, Livedoor and Yahoo! Japan, and the Grand Hyatt Tokyo. It cost over $4 billion and is built on a 27 acre (109,000 m²) site. The site amalgamated more than 400 smaller lots Mori acquired over 14 years. [1]

The first six levels of Mori Tower contain retail stores and restaurants. The top six floors house the Mori Art Museum and the Tokyo City View with panoramic views of the city. A new exit from the Roppongi stop on the Hibiya line of the Tokyo Metro empties into a glass atrium filled with large television screens and escalators, as well as several shops and restaurants. The rest of the building is office space.

Around the Mori Tower are several smaller buildings predominantly occupied by shops and restaurants, the five-star Grand Hyatt Tokyo, a Virgin Cinemaplex, and the Mori Garden. Behind the Mori Tower lies the Roppongi Keyakizaka Street which has cafes and luxury stores such as Louis Vuitton.

Large open spaces have been built into the design of Roppongi Hills. About half of the area consists of gardens, pavilions, and other open spaces. The Mohri Garden, an elaborate and authentic Japanese garden complete with a pond and trees is particularly popular. The Mohri Garden is a part of a lost mansion that housed members of the feudal Mohri clan.[2]

Criticism and conflict in Roppongi Hills
Roppongi Hills Arena is a facility with large outdoor speakers, in close proximity to older housing. Since the construction of the Roppongi Hills development, complaints of noise pollution from older residents have been ignored by Mori Building management, according to residents. The building most directly suffering from noise is on top of an embankment opposite the Arena. Residents claim several residents have been forced out by the noise.[3][4]

Financial issues
Mori Building has financed the project with $800 million equity and $1.3 billion in debt from a syndicate of banks led by the Development Bank of Japan. As a result, the company's overall debts are $5.6 billion, secured by billions more in assets.

Goldman Sachs & Co., the project's anchor tenant, attracted deep discounts in rental prices because of the large amount of space it occupies. Japan's sluggish economy, staff cuts by foreign companies, and the flow of new office space have put downward pressure on rents.

Because of weak eminent domain laws in Japan, several past residents of the Roppongi Hills site have been given residential units in the complex in return for their agreement to vacate their prior homes.

(Article based on Wikitravel article by Wikitravel users Brian Kurkoski, Richard Petersen, Ted O'Neill and Paul N. Richter and Wikitravel user(s) Jpatokal, Makiko, Miki-monomaniac, Nzpcmad, Huttite and Luke. Article used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0.)