“Over the weekend, I dropped in on Roppongi Hills and found myself in for a surprise,” writes a reporter for evening tabloid Nikkan Gendai (Feb 13). “After watching a movie, we went to grab a bite, and the restaurant where we planned to eat was closed! There was a sign out front explaining that it was ‘Closed for Renewal.’ The pricey Coach and Versace boutiques, at some point, had also been closed.”

This coming April 25 will mark the 5th anniversary of the opening of the Roppongi Hills complex in Minato Ward. And to mark the occasion, many of the original tenants appear to be leaving in droves — perhaps as many as 50.

“Many Hills tenants are coming to the end of their five-year leases,” explains the owner of a restaurant located therein. “We were given an incentive arrangement based on our sales, but were under pressure to boost profitability.”

Taken in that context, the article implies, this is just another way of saying the ostensible rent increase was effectively an eviction.

“Actually he picked a smart time to leave,” an unnamed source in the real estate business tells Nikkan Gendai. “Tenants knew from the beginning that because of high rents they wouldn’t break even. Opening a shop there at the beginning was just a kind of status symbol. But since the incident leading to the arrest of Livedoor CEO Takafumi Horie (in Jan. 2006), Roppongi Hills’glamorous image has taken a beating.

“Many businesses,” he adds, “are realizing that for about the same rents, they can relocate to the nearby Midtown complex, or Ginza, both of which have much stronger customer pull these days. And some companies gradually found the notion of being lumped with the decadent ‘Hills-zoku’ (Hills Tribe) to be so unappealing, they movedtheir offices.”

Once the Livedoor fiasco broke the ice, other companies began bailing out. Nikkan Gendai cites such examples as Rakuten, which relocated its corporate headquarters from Roppongi to Shinagawa. Others, such as Yahoo Japan and Konami, just shifted to Midtown, only a few minutes away on foot.

“The reasons for shop closures were determined by the tenants on a case-by-case basis,” is the explanation given a spokesperson for Mori Corp, which manages Roppongi Hills. “We were counting on achieving a modus vivendi with Midtown, and we are not aware of any particular niche. Now after five years, we’ve become better familiarized with customer needs, and Hills is undergoing a renewal process aimed at improving its services.”

Once renovations are completed, visitors to the complex can expect to see more shops and sports-related facilities aimed at families. But Nikkan Gendai appears unconvinced as to whether these extensive “renewals” now underway will ultimately generate profits for Roppongi Hills.

When it’s all said and done, this five-year “boom-to-bust” cycle for glitzy complexes, it would seem, epitomizes Tokyo’s modern-day adaptation of the principles of slash-and-burn agriculture.

3 Comments

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  Loki520 at 08:35 AM JST - 29th March

  Slash and Burn architecture?

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  flammenwerfer at 09:04 AM JST - 29th March

  "“Tenants knew from the beginning that because of high rents they wouldn’t break even. Opening a shop there at the beginning was just a kind of status symbol."

  Or a kind of advertising for other branches of the same store, like a glorified billboard of sorts. Dicey game to play for the owners of the complex though

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  borscht at 10:06 AM JST - 29th March

  I'm still wondering why it is when Person A does something illegal, the building in which he lived (but didn't work) gets a bad reputation.

  When Kadokawa - publisher -was busted for drugs a decade ago, bookstores pulled his company's books off the shelf (for a short time then realized they were losing money and brought them back.) Is an author responsible for his or her publisher's private life?

  Is Roppongi Hills (the building, not management) responsible for its tenants' private lives? Or was Horie just a good excuse to get out of a bad leasing arrangement?

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