Reminiscings of Youth: The Keio Plaza Hotel

 

I'm providing a special Reminiscings of Youth article tonight in that it doesn't revolve around any of the Western songs that I usually centre a ROY around. The target is actually a building!🏢

Earlier tonight, I was watching an NHK hour-long documentary on the stories behind the architecture of some of the buildings erected in Tokyo in the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn't too dense and academic since it was some entertainers who were leading the way including a comedian who had studied architecture at university before he decided to take that very different career path.

A number of buildings were featured including a few in West Shinjuku which is also known as the Skyscraper District. I used to walk through the area on a weekly basis since I did have one teaching gig in the area for several years, and I thought it was quite the marvel to put up so many hulking towers there considering how earthquake-prone Japan is. One of the buildings on that program was the Keio Plaza Hotel, accommodations where I stayed at for four nights and five days during the summer of 1989. It was the base for many many new recruits on the JET Programme as we had our orientation session there before getting shipped out to our respective prefectures.

What I learned on the program was that the Keio was the very first skyscraper to be erected in West Shinjuku which used to be the site of a huge water treatment facility. And from Wikipedia, I found out that it was the first high-rise hotel in Japan. Looking at a photo of the hotel when it was first put up in 1971, it stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of nowhere so I could only imagine what the first guests were thinking when they arrived. Of course, since then, the Keio has been swamped by fellow skyscrapers including other hotels.

I'd assumed that the Keio Plaza was actually put up a decade later but the program set me straight, and I also discovered that it was given its distinctive Z-shape (looking at the roof from the sky) so that every room had a decent view. As I said off the top, I was able to stay there for the better part of a week during an especially torrid summer, and my biggest memories included having the view of the soon-to-be complete Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building which struck me as looking like a life-sized version of the SDF 1 from "Macross" and having a fellow JET teacher/free spirited hippie type take me barefoot outside to the nearest international phone booth while my sweat glands allowed me to become a human sprinkler in the notorious heat and humidity of a Tokyo summer.

Although I only stayed there that one time in 1989, in the years since when I was actually living and working in the Tokyo area, I have used the Keio lobby as a meeting place for folks whenever we didn't want to meet up at the usually crowded JR Shinjuku Station, especially when our dinner venue was actually in West Shinjuku. 

Well, I guess since I used the Keio Plaza Hotel as a target for this special ROY, I figure that I will just have to give another one for the Tokyo Prince Hotel sometime down the line since that place has even more meaning to me. In any case, I will provide the songs at No. 8, 9 and 10 for August 1989 on the Oricon chart this time around.

8. Bakufu Slump -- Resort Lovers （リゾ・ラバ）

9. Princess Princess -- Diamonds

10. Yumi Matsutoya -- Anniversary