I’m 60 now, but I lived in Shiba 2-chōme as a child. One of my happiest memories is returning from Shiba Park and being treated by my grandmother to ice cream with a wafer at the Tokyo Prince Hotel … So many of my family’s memories are layered within this place. I used to admire the elegance of the building and the grace of the staff. The pool, too, holds reflections of my youth. I hope the hotel will continue bringing people together.
An installation resembling a Tanabata tree stood in the foyer of the Tokyo Prince Hotel during its 60th anniversary festivities last September. Traditionally, such trees bear paper wishes, but here hung guests’ recollections of the hotel. Each note carried a vignette like the one above—a sweet childhood memory with a cherry on top.
The sentiments adorning the tree belonged, for the most part, to a distinct historical moment. In pre-war Japan, the Western-style hotel experience remained largely out of reach for the average citizen. The Imperial Hotel opened in 1890 with backing from the Meiji government and the Imperial Household, catering to foreign dignitaries and the Japanese elite. It set a precedent for a lineage of hotels, including the Fujiya in Hakone and Yokohama’s New Grand, that followed in its path. These establishments, typically located in port cities or resort towns, embraced Western aesthetics and catered to a rarefied circle of guests. In the postwar era, hotels like the Okura and the New Otani inherited and updated this tradition.
When the Tokyo Prince Hotel opened on September 1, 1964, just over five weeks before the Tokyo Olympics, it marked something of a shift. The hotel welcomed a burgeoning domestic middle class with a new kind of cosmopolitan hospitality. Many of its early guests had grown up during wartime scarcity and austerity; now, for the first time, they entered a culture of leisure. Their children, who enjoyed ice cream with a wafer, went on to celebrate weddings, honeymoons, anniversaries, and birthdays at the Tokyo Prince.
The outdoor pool shaded by parasols, the array of restaurants, and the approachable pricing that once made the Tokyo Prince the setting for so many family memories still endure. In contrast, most of Tokyo’s budget-friendly hotels achieve affordability by paring back to the bare essentials and minimising human staff. But the Tokyo Prince retains an almost complete hotel experience, delivered by people. A modestly priced 200 ft² room with a view that upholds these fundamentals has become a rare find in the city.
Depending on your perspective, there’s a trade-off: you’ll be staying in a relic. The hotel has seen three major renovations over the decades, most recently in a substantial 2017 overhaul. But refurbishment cannot hide the patina of the past. Lightly stained coffered ceilings, brass fixtures, and period lighting still speak the language of mid-century design.
Some might call the hotel tired. The glamorous guests who once swept past the check-in counter in the 1970s and 1980s have largely been replaced by a more pragmatic clientele—delegates of cost-conscious corporate meetings and conferences. For me, though, it’s no compromise. It means a quiet stay close to the heart of the city, where one can wander the corridors of Tokyo’s modern history at leisure, undisturbed.
Location
The Tokyo Prince features a taxi loop and a dedicated coach stop at its main entrance, a porte-cochère, emblematic of the high-end hotels of its era. The grounds place a generous distance between the building and the street, creating a sense of stately arrival. Even the approach is marked by traffic lights, a rare detail for a hotel driveway, signalling that the automobile was always the presumed mode of arrival. To attune myself to the area, though, I prefer to arrive by public transit.
From Exit A1 of Onarimon Station on the Toei Mita Line, we emerge into Shibakoen, meaning Shiba Park, a district comprising four chōme quarters. Though it shares its name, the district is distinct from Shiba Park proper, which spans much of southern 4-chōme. To the north stands Zōjō-ji, the head temple of the Pure Land Buddhist sect, around which the park was originally laid. Within 4-chōme, Tokyo Tower rises to the east. Next door in 3-chōme, alongside schools, plazas, and gardens, sits the Tokyo Prince.
These expanses of municipally owned land and cloistered institutions are hemmed in by Tokyo Metropolitan Route 301 and the broad Hibiya-dōri. Step outside the parks or complexes, and it can feel as though there’s little here. The area offers scant local amenities, and even along the fringes of 1- and 2-chōme, residential life is limited to a scattering of apartment blocks. To sense anything resembling a neighbourhood, you’ll need to walk down to Shiba 2-chōme, where the child with the wafer ice cream once lived.
Shibakoen lies at the symbolic heartland of Minato-ku—one of Tokyo’s wealthiest wards and a major centre for business, diplomacy, and administration. Approaching the broad façade of the Tokyo Prince, with Tokyo Tower shimmering above, I wonder how a classic hotel came to occupy such a generous parcel of land in this exclusive locale.
Development
Prince Hotels is part of the Seibu Group, a company best known to the public for its railway lines and department stores. The portfolio spans 69 properties across Japan, ranging from the pared-down “Smart Inn” to the high-end “Grand” collection. The Tokyo Prince occupies a distinct niche within this hierarchy. Though not positioned as a luxury property, it is neither budget nor marginal. Two earlier Prince Hotels came before it, but the Tokyo Prince’s 1964 opening officially inaugurated the brand. It remains the foundational model.
The land now occupied by the hotel once formed part of the Zōjō-ji temple complex. It was the Tokugawa family’s principal interment site during the Edo Period (1603–1868). Among its structures was the Taitoku-in Mausoleum, built in 1632 for the second shōgun, Tokugawa Hidetada. Much of the complex was lost during World War II, particularly in the 1945 air raids, which destroyed Taitoku-in. Today, the surviving main gate stands as a monument along Hibiya-dōri.
In the aftermath of the war, Japan’s 1947 Constitution abolished the kazoku aristocracy, which included feudal lords, court nobility, and those ennobled for service to the state. New property tax laws followed, placing heavy financial pressure on these former elites, compelling many to sell their estates. Yasujirō Tsutsumi, then head of Kokudo Keikaku, the forerunner of today’s Seibu Group, seized the moment, purchasing several such properties at reduced prices. Among them, the former site of the Tokugawa mausoleum.
Following the destruction of the tomb complex, the government withdrew the site’s designation as an Important Cultural Property. At the time, a shantytown in Shiba Park, home to Tokyoites displaced by the firebombings, further diminished the area’s appeal to most developers. These circumstances allowed Tsutsumi to acquire the land. His broader vision was to integrate rail, real estate, and hospitality into a domestic lifestyle economy: weekend trips, family holidays, department stores, ski resorts. The Tokyo Prince became emblematic of this ecosystem, aspirational yet attainable.
Design
The Tokyo Prince Hotel was designed by Masahiko Umezaki, an in-house architect at Takenaka Corporation. Takenaka oversaw design and construction in tandem—a standard approach in Japan, where vertically integrated firms manage architectural authorship and execution. Umezaki’s façade is symmetrical and rectilinear, clad in pale surfaces with regular bands of glazing. It remains functionalist in origin, but tinged with amber, almost as if the building has absorbed decades of cigarette smoke.
Beneath the porte-cochère and into the foyer, we enter a space that negotiates contemporary functionality with remnants of mid-century detail. The original 1964 interiors were designed by Murano Mori Architects, the firm co-founded by Tōgo Murano, who would come to be regarded as one of Japan’s modern architectural masters. Despite its three renovations, the hotel has more or less escaped the polished erasure of history. Nor has it embraced the kind of overt Shōwa Retro aesthetic that might render it a gimmick and flood it with trend-chasing visitors.
That said, the 2017 renovation, undertaken with the 2020 Olympics approaching, did adopt a theme of “timeless nostalgia.” Rather than competing with Tokyo’s newest luxury offerings, the design ethos leaned into the hotel’s place in the city’s history. Still, the nostalgia I sense doesn’t stem from the curated details. Instead, it arises from the sediment left behind by each successive refurbishment—layers from different decades that surface here and there, like strata, revealing flashes of the past.
As you wander through the foyer and turn its corners, the hotel’s wayfinding system reveals itself through kanban-style lightboxes, a typology reminiscent of postwar onsen resorts. These signs, printed on washi-textured acrylic, are softly backlit within black casings, guiding guests to sushi counters and tempura parlours with a luminous clarity that fuses modern typographic precision with wafū resonance.
Descending an angular spiral staircase reveals the Prince Shopping Arcade, an echo of the hotel’s heyday as a self-contained commercial enclave. A red carpet is rolled improbably down to the in-house Lawson konbini—perhaps the only convenience store in Tokyo approached by a crimson path. Here on the basement level, several surviving boutiques and a dealer in photographic and art prints potter along, receiving little footfall. The promenade links to the Wedding Hall and the Make-up and Costume rooms, both of which seem faded from frequent use but are now largely unfrequented.
Upstairs, the renovated hallways and guest rooms have the neutral polish typical of Tokyo’s generic mid-range hotel stock. Still, each room I’ve stayed in has included one of the hotel’s most evocative holdovers: a built-in bedside unit, likely installed during the 1970s refurbishment. It combines a rotary aircon dial, twin lamp controls, and a safe with a satisfyingly tactile 12-key punch pad, all housed in a single panel of pale metal. It is space-efficient and subtly retro-futuristic. Amid the neutral, economically appointed interiors, it provides a reminder of where we are. And of course, from any east-facing room, there’s no nearer view of Tokyo Tower.
To commemorate the 60th anniversary, staff were issued reproductions of historic uniforms—revivals from the hotel’s earliest days. Among them: the bellhop’s blue tailcoat detailed with brass buttons and the Tea Salon Pikake’s navy one-piece dress, layered with a laced apron overlay. Whether dressed in anniversary attire or not, service here remains consistently courteous and professional. Like the anonymous sixty-year-old from Shiba 2-chōme, I continue to admire the elegance of the building and the grace of the staff who work within it.
Coffee
Tea Salon Pikake is just off the main lobby. Its distinctive low-slung banquettes create a soft threshold between the salon and the foyer, which remains unchanged since opening, along with its coffered ceiling. The atmosphere becomes part lobby, part refined kissaten.
And so, it’s time to sit back with a hand-dripped coffee. In this lightly buzzing yet uncrowded space, one can watch the theatre of the lobby unfold—a vantage point from which to consider the passage of time and the layering of memory. It feels like a view afforded only by a place that has shifted as much as the Tokyo Prince and the ground beneath it.
Perusing the menu, no yōshoku classic is omitted. It’s your choice of naporitan, omuraisu, hambāgu, or beef curry doria. For dessert, I’m eyeing the hotcake, affectionately and unironically described in English as “nostalgia cake.” There’s even the option of ice cream, served with a wafer and a cherry on top.
Until we meet at the Tokyo Prince,
AJ
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