By Damian Flanagan

As I exclusively jet in and out of Japan via Kansai International Airport, I am almost completely oblivious to the presence of a really quite large town in the east of the country. In recent years however, I've started to visit the capital with renewed vigour, now that the COVID years are hopefully behind us.

The other week I was touring with my two daughters and we took a week-long trip with a Hokuriku Arch pass in hand. We stayed at Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, and Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture, and then I thought I would take them up to Tokyo for a couple of days, as they had only sketchy memories of the city from their previous visits.

How do you attack a city as vast as Tokyo with only two days at your disposal? The possibilities seem endless and a generous itinerary could easily demand at least a week in the megalopolis. I went for the fairly obvious options of a day around the museums and sites of Ueno Park and another day around the Imperial Palace area. Tokyo was utterly resplendent in the spring sunshine.

We had arranged to have dinner in the Azabu Juban neighbourhood and emerged out of the subway at Kamiyacho Station nearby, intending to walk from there. But I was in for a considerable surprise. For Kamiyacho subway station decants you into an extensive underground warren, on multiple levels, of high-class boutiques and shops above which soars three towers collectively known as Azabudai Hills. One of the towers has 64 floors and is now the highest residential and commercial building in Japan. The whole development is quite some sight to behold.

If you live in the Greater Tokyo area then the Azabudai Hills development is doubtless old news (it was completed in 2023), but if like me you sweep in from the provinces and observe it, then it thrusts itself in front of your face as a staggering piece of property development. So amazed was I by its scale that I immediately looked it up online and discovered that it can home 3,500 residents and 25,000 office workers and cost in total $5.3 billion. It has a park area at its centre and incorporates a street lined with luxury brand shops intended to make a trip to Ginza obsolete.

The tower is the latest development of the Mori Group, who have already erected the vast Roppongi Hills (cost $4 billion), Toranomon Hills (cost $5.3 billion) and Ark Hills developments amongst many others across the city. Azabudai Hills now forms virtually the equivalent of a city within a city -- I suspect you could live, work, shop and take your recreation all within the confines of Azabudai Hills and never particularly feel the need to go anywhere else.

I became curious to know more about the people behind this amazing development. A cursory online search tells you that the Mori Group was started in 1959 by Taikichiro Mori (1904-1993), a former economics professor, who gave up his post to start a building company and who by 1991-92 had become the richest man in the world.

His son Minoru Mori (1934-2012) was the driving force behind developments in Tokyo and Shanghai and was named Asian Businessman of the Year 2007 by Fortune magazine. Minoru had a younger brother Akira (1936-), with whom he had a falling out over business direction, and who broke away to create a separate company, Mori Trust, in 1999, and which now owns vast office developments and luxury hotels across Japan and the U.S. Akira alone is valued at $3 billion, though the business is now run by his only daughter Miwako Date.

What an extraordinary story, I marvelled, and yet it's incredible how so few people outside Japan are likely to have ever heard about Taikichiro Mori, his children or the amazing buildings his family have constructed. If you consider how high-profile people like Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos are today, the relative anonymity of the Mori family is striking.

Sitting at a table in Azabu Juban and craning my neck to look up at Azabudai Hills looming above me, I couldn't help thinking that this felt like some kind of Biblical Tower of Babel, soaring upwards to heaven as the ultimate symbol of Tokyo's hubris. Tokyo appeared to me on that spring evening as almost too perfect -- too wealthy, too filled with achievement and prosperity. My inner pessimist whispered in my ear that hubris is inevitably followed by nemesis...

The Wonders of the Ancient World eventually succumbed to natural disaster. The Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria were devastated in earthquakes, the Temple of Artemis was burnt to the ground. The soaring Mori Monuments, the towers of modern Tokyo -- one of the most earthquake prone cities in the world -- have yet to be put to the test of great seismic movements.

For the moment at least, Azabudai Hills is for me one of the great wonders of the world, somewhere that I would advise every visitor to Tokyo to go out of their way to visit. I pray that it remains Tokyo's majestic wonder for many years to come.

@DamianFlanagan

(This is Part 63 of a series)

In this column, Damian Flanagan, a researcher in Japanese literature, ponders about Japanese culture as he travels back and forth between Japan and Britain.

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Damian Flanagan is an author and critic born in Britain in 1969. He studied in Tokyo and Kyoto between 1989 and 1990 while a student at Cambridge University. He was engaged in research activities at Kobe University from 1993 through 1999. After taking the master's and doctoral courses in Japanese literature, he earned a Ph.D. in 2000. He is now based in both Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, and Manchester. He is the author of "Natsume Soseki: Superstar of World Literature" (Sekai Bungaku no superstar Natsume Soseki).