Roppongi Hills

My Japanese teacher from the US and two of her students and my classmates came to Japan this week. Today was my last day off before school starts. I met up with my teacher, and the two students in Shinjuku and we went to Roppongi and met up with another student there.

From there we went to Roppongi Hills which is a Amazing building that has just about everything. The complex has apartments, shops, restaurants, offices space, and a bunch of other stuff with the concept being a almost self contained world. The whole structure is on rollers so in the event of a earthquake it can roll side to side 3 or 4 feet! It's pretty cool. Roppongi Hills is one of many developments made by Mr. Mori. He is a super rich guy that has built many famous places throughout Japan.

We went to a Tonkatsu restaurant and walked around the grounds from there. There is a interesting but kinda creepy spider statue there and at night is lite up and looks even crazier but it's one of those things that you only see in Japan.

Not far from Roppongi hills is a newer place that is probably in direct competition with Roppongi Hills called Tokyo Midtown. This is another building that is amazing but not as cool to look at.

When we first came in the building we went to the reception desk to get some information about the building and where we should go. My teacher was talking to the girl that was helping us and thought that the girl was nice and asked if she was single. The girl said that she was single and my teacher recommended me. The girl seemed pretty happy about the whole thing and I wound up giving her my number and E-mail.

From there we walked around and found that SoftBank was running a promotion at one end of the building. SoftBank is a newer cell phone company that bought Vodaphone who bought J phone. From what I've heard they have a lot of hidden fees and aren't that great. Right now Cameron Diaz is doing their adds and her face was all over Tokyo Midtown. I think part of that is because Yahoo! Japan has their offices there and they are linked up with SoftBank.

No one markets products quite like the Japanese do. To help promote the Yahoo! SoftBank merger they had huge adds everywhere and used a entire section of the building just for promotion. They had a phone hooked up to a big screen and PA system playing music. The girls working the place were all wearing silver miniskirts and giving out bags with info about the phones in them. There was also a American Baseball player there posing for pictures and they had a slot machine that you could play to win cups, key chains, and some other stuff.

Tokyo midtown is mostly just a shopping mall with a museum in it. I guess in Japan anytime you build a mall you need to include a museum of some type. The building like most Japanese buildings had a lot of cool visual stuff. They had a set of strings arranged in a circle hanging from the third floor and connecting to a pool at the bottom of the first floor. It was a really cool thing because they had water cascading down the strings into the lighted pool below.

You can kinda see the strings with the water in the picture above.

From there we went back to Shinjuku. My teacher and the two students had a room that they won at the Park Hyatt which is the same Hotel that Bill Murry stayed at in "Lost in Translation" It was really cool and the room was really nice. This was just kinda the hang out room. The bedroom had a very large TV and there was another TV in the bathroom. The room itself was on the 40 something floor and had a great view.

After that I headed back home for dinner. My host mom always makes great food and her son who lives in the same building but 3 floors up joined us for dinner. He is a pretty cool guy and he backpacked across the US when he was younger.

When dinner was over I was surprised to find that I had received a E-mail from the girl from Tokyo Midtown. We had a little small talk and she sent me a picture of her and her friends at work. So I guess we are planning on meeting up sometime next week.