2012年10月11日

New Office

The view towards Odaiba from the new ALEX office


The ALEX HQ has relocated to a rather swish office building in Tennozu Isle, close to Odaiba.  Once a warehouse district, the area was transformed by waterfront planning that saw it reborn as a modern city. There are now high-rise offices, theaters, hotels, apartment complexes, sports facilities and more in the area. With the addition of a connection to the Rinkai Line, access to recreational spots like Odaiba and Disneyland is smooth and easy.

Odaiba is a large artificial island in Tokyo Bay, located across the Rainbow Bridge from central Tokyo. It was initially built for defensive purposes in the 1850s, dramatically expanded during the late 20th century as a seaport district, and has developed since the 1990s as a major commercial, residential and leisure area.

The name Odaiba comes from a series of six island fortresses constructed in 1853 by Egawa Hidetatsu for the Tokugawa shogunate in order to protect Edo from attack by sea, the primary threat being Commodore Matthew Perry's Black Ships which had arrived in the same year. Daiba in Japanese refers to the cannon batteries placed on the islands. In 1928, the Dai-San Daiba or "No. 3 Battery" was refurbished and opened to the public as the Metropolitan Daiba Park, and remains open to this day.

Of the originally planned 11 batteries, only five were ever finished. The modern island of Odaiba began to take shape when the Port of Tokyo opened in 1941. Until the mid 1960s all except two batteries were either removed for unhindered passage of ships or incorporated into the Shinagawa port facilities and Tennozu Isle. In 1979, the then called landfill no. 13 (now Minato-ku Daiba, Shinagawa-ku Higashi-Yashio and Kōtō-ku Aomi districts) was finished directly connecting with the old "No. 3 Battery". "No. 6 Battery" (center left in the image) was left to nature (landing prohibited).

Tokyo governor Shun'ichi Suzuki began a major plan in the early 1990s to redevelop Odaiba as Tokyo Teleport Town. A showcase for futuristic living with new residential and commercial development housing a population of over 100,000, the redevelopment was scheduled to be complete in time for a planned "International Urban Exposition" in spring 1996.

Suzuki's successor Yukio Aoshima halted the plan in 1995, by which point over JPY 1 trillion had been spent on the project, and Odaiba was still under populated and full of vacant lots. Many of the special companies set up to develop the island became practically bankrupt. The collapse of the Japanese asset price bubble was a major factor, as it frustrated commercial development in Tokyo generally. The area was also viewed as inconvenient for business, as its physical connections to Tokyo—the Rainbow Bridge and the Yurikamome rapid transit line—made travel to and from central Tokyo relatively time-consuming.

The area started coming back to life in the late 1990s as a tourist and leisure zone, with several large hotels and shopping malls. Several large companies including Fuji Television moved their headquarters to the island, and transportation links improved with the connection of the Rinkai Line into the JR East railway network in 2002 and the eastward extension of the Yurikamome to Toyosu in 2006. Tokyo Big Sight, the convention center originally built to house Governor Suzuki's planned intercity convention, also became a major venue for international expositions.