The Capitol Hotel Tokyu

The ground has been called Star Hill since long before any of it, for the night sky. Kitaoji Rosanjin presided over the members only Hoshigaoka Saryo up here from the end of Taisho into the first years of Showa. The Tokyo Hilton, the first hotel in Japan run with a foreign chain, opened on the site in June 1963, took the Capitol Tokyu name in 1984 and closed in 2006. The name is spelled Capitol for the Diet building nearby rather than capital for the city. The tower that replaced it opened in October 2010.

Kengo Kuma's office supervised the exterior and the public rooms. Thin granite hung on an aluminium curtain wall gives the tower a lattice that shifts its own shadows through the day. The low block is planted heavily enough, roof included, that the shrine's trees appear to carry on over it, down to a still pond holding two rafts of water lilies. The side facing the prime minister's residence has no balconies and no window that opens.

There are 251 rooms, more than forty percent fewer than the old hotel held, and the smallest runs to 44.8 square metres. Most stack from the eighteenth floor to the twenty ninth, shoji and fusuma inside, the National Diet Building in the glass. The Garden Suite and the Sanno Suite are the exception, down on the fifth floor.

The Pearl Room, the old ballroom where the Beatles met the press in 1966, is gone, but its stage wall has been built again outside the first floor banquet hall. Ink work by Toko Shinoda came across from the old building, and sculpture by Sofu Teshigahara. The signboard in the Japanese restaurant is Rosanjin's.