To that point: there are few places on earth that will bring together quite as many pleasure-seeking aesthetes as one of Schrager’s properties. And on its opening night, The Tokyo Edition, Ginza played host to his glamorous entourage, including DJ Peggy Gou, Got7’s Jackson Wang, Dita Von Teese, Blackpink’s artistic director Verdy and the fashion designer Tomo Koizumi. At these launch events, the Edition’s buildings are known to take on the atmosphere of a decadent frat house. The panoramic Sophie was repurposed as DJ Nick Grimshaw’s dance floor; the low-lit Punch Room—which has all the class of an old boy’s club without the ruddy-nosed lounge lizards—served ryokucha tea and sake-infused cocktails; and the hotel’s lush rooftop enclaves provided views above and beyond the neighborhood’s low-slung architecture, as if perched on the edge of a vast and twinkling urban jungle.
This is, perhaps, the sort of late-night bacchanalia that The Tokyo Edition, Toranomon is better suited for. (The hotel is quite literally built on a nightclub, which its neighboring guests in Ginza are free to visit, alongside its state-of-the-art gyms, conservatory-style swimming pools, and Scandinavian spas.) It’s a point worth remembering when deciding between these two hotels: if Toranomon is the Edition’s first-class ocean liner, then consider Ginza a snug port in the storm, nestled as it is between LVMH flagships, the district’s Kabuki theatres and all those ancient sushi counters still operating from where the Tsukiji fish market once stood. The Tokyo Edition, Ginza sits on these precise fault lines—between tradition and modernity—like a Bonsai emerging from concrete sprawl. I arrived in Tokyo feeling as though I could be anywhere in the world, and I left knowing that there is, in fact, nowhere quite like it.