TOKYO PARK HYATT HOTEL

This blog is inspired by my two SIMPLE SOLUTIONS books: for Planet Earth and Humanity. Chapter 6 of the second book picks the best place to live. In this spirit, today I will report on the Tokyo Park Hyatt Hotel, Pearl and my home for the next few days.

Many of you remember the movie starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, but the real star was the hotel itself: the Tokyo Park Hyatt.

The hotel occupies the 39th to 52nd floors of a tower in Shinjuku designed by Kenzo Tange. Our room came with Narita Aiport pick-up, breakfast, afternoon tea and cocktails/canapes (foie gras, strange white cheese and a hybrid sashimi/ceviche/poke) in the New York Bar on the 52nd floor.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, connection to the world-wide web is free and the linkage is very, very fast. In Japan there is this general practice where expensive hotels charge for the internet, usually $25/day, while cheaper chains offer it for free.

Lunch will be a hanami (picnic under cherry blossom trees) at the Shinjuku Park and tonight we have dinner at the New York Grill with my roots search team of Hiromi Hotta (and her husband, Kenji, who is an ocean engineering professor from Nihon University), Fumio Ito (from Tokyo Electric Power, who was the lead for the Japan Nauru OTEC project) and Takayoshi Ota (from Shimizu, who was also on that OTEC team), who in the Fall of 2007 accompanied us to Utashinai.
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