Edifice of the Week: The Tokyo Club

The original Tokyo Club was begun in the 1880s by Emperor Meiji, after one of his aides overheard a visiting British dignitary complain about the lack of a "proper club" in the city. It was destroyed during the war, but its most recent reincarnation is magnificent. But it comes in a plain wrapper. The Tokyo Club is a nondescript cube. It offers no hint of its purpose, nor of the wonders awaiting the few who ever see the inside.

It's easy to overlook the Tokyo Club on a street like this one. The other buildings in this exclusive neighborhood compete with eachother for attention with dramatic architecture. The Swedish embassy next door (below) is a good example.




The club doesn't advertise itself. An understated sign above the entry--not really visible from the sidewalk (unless you have a zoom lens)--tells you this cube is the Tokyo Club. A small "TC" logo next to the door is the only other clue. On either side, trees and shrubs provide a privacy fence.

The only reason I know anything about this place is that I was recently invited to lunch there by a business contact who is a member. I have no pictures of the interior (that's not allowed), but it deserves description.

Upon entering, you must register. A member may bring guests, but no guest may visit more than twice a month. All briefcases, etc. must be checked. The club is amazingly conservative. The strict suit-and-tie dress code is just the beginning. Passing the reception area, you see the club rules displayed on the wall: no discussions of politics or religion, no for-profit business dealings. Women may not join. They may visit the club (this concession is only two years old) but must be in the company of a member, and only in the evenings.

The south end of the first floor features a large library. You begin to see that clean lines, rectangles, muted colors are part of the scheme. The north end has a large room with tables, a big fireplace, and a bar running the entire length of its south wall. No view from this room to the outside.

Climbing the slate stairs to the second floor, you notice the white glass you saw from the outside is fairly transparent from the inside. Sunlight pours in. At the top of the stairs is a large room with tables and chairs and a small bar. The long north wall of this room is entirely transparent. It is kept from outside eyes by its elevation and a barrier of trees. Outside, before the trees, at the same level as the floor, is a rectangular reflecting pool. With glass wall is almost invisible, making the surface of the water seem like an extension of the floor of the room in which you stand. It's an amazing architectural effect. It looks as though you could walk out onto the water.

You can sit here and talk, as we did, waiting for lunch, feeling like you're outside. Lunch is served in the large central room of the second floor. At a word from the maitre d', we entered and were shown to a table. The finest of everything. The delicious, world-class lunch (I had the chicken & leek soup, duck with pears, and sorbet) costs less than $10 American. This is a club dining room, and it's not out to make a profit.

After a long, leisurely lunch getting to know each other, my host took me to explore the rest of the club. On the south side of the third floor are two rooms for playing "go," which seems to be a sort of Japanese chess. One room has several tables; the second only two. The latter room is more finely finished. It is reserved for players who have achieved a certain status, sort of black-belt go players.

Beyond these rooms is one with two rich-leather, reclining massage chairs, the most impressive I've seen. They have sleeves to put your arms in. Along the east wall is a set of roomy cubicles. Each has an enormous leather recliner, a flat-screen TV, and a set of headphones. If you want, you can just sit and watch TV--any channel you want.

In the northeast corner is a simulated golf driving range. No doubt you've seen these before--you hit a real ball into a tarp that has an image of a distant flag projected on it. The computer then calculates your trajectory, and tells you how far you hit, etc. Those are fun, but this one is amazing. In the first place, the definition of the projection is top-notch. It really makes it feel like you're lining up a tee shot outside (and the experience was better than usual for me, because I was able to choose from an array of the finest drivers in the world--nothing that's ever seen the inside of my bag).

I took a swing. Once I hit the ball, analytical graphics popped up on the screen in front of me. At the bottom, a window showed a side view of the hypothetical flight of my ball. An arc traced the flight; I watched it fly, drop, bounce, and roll. Just for fun, the flights of the last few hitters were displayed there as well, so I could compare my drive. In the upper right a window showed the same thing, but from an overhead perspective. Counters displayed how far the ball flew through the air, how long it rolled, and how far in total the drive went. I didn't like what I saw after my first hit, so I tried another. And another. Finally, on my fourth swing, I hit one just right. Hypothetically, it went 230 yards, right down the middle--not all that far, but I don't hit very long. It was good enough to be the longest drive on the display, so I left it at that.

The north side of the third floor is open, to provide overhead room for the reflecting pool room I described above. But there is one place, at the north end of the west hall, that protrudes out into this open space. Through some trick of perception, it looks as though the hall disappears into thin air at the end. You walk out onto the protrusion, a balcony of sorts, and it feels as though you're standing in the air. The floor of the balcony is the same color and texture as the floor of the room beneath, so it seems to disappear. The safety wall around the balcony is made of glass. All in all, I'm not quite sure how the illusion works, but I can promise you it is very effective. My knees almost buckled.

The fourth floor is given over to an enormous billiard room. It needs to be big because the billiard tables are the largest I've ever seen. Easily twelve feet long. There was a tournament going on, so we didn't stay. A handful of serious-looking men were watching the match from elevated chairs along one wall.

As if this club needed anything more to make it staid and reserved, membership is limited to 500 people. As a result, my host told me, hardly anyone is ever there! We saw about twenty people at lunch, but besides that, we only saw one other member, and the handful at billiards.

If you are recommended for membership by the membership committee, you can wait your turn to have your application voted on by the members. You will be waiting for someone to die, or be blackballed (they still do that here) or leave Japan for good. About half of the members belong to parliament. The Emperor is a member. Ambassadors from other countries are members.

The by-laws specify that a certain percentage of the membership be foreigners. That is how my acquaintance got in, over twenty years ago. Now, he is on the membership committee. He tells me that it is not uncommon for applicants to take ten to twenty years to be admitted. After we left, I looked back at this plain, white cube and thought about David Niven's club in "Around the World in 80 Days."

I thanked my host, and told him I would brag to my colleagues about having been in the exclusive Tokyo Club. He gave me a half-smile, and told me that aside from the members, those they occasionally bring, and a handful of applicants, and the staff, nobody knows the place exists.

I thought maybe my host had been a little overly dramatic. But when I came back another day to take pictures of the club's exterior, I found this neighborhood map (below) posted on a large sign just down the street. I noticed that all the buildings were well-labeled, except for one...say, what is that little cube-shaped building in the middle of the map?