The first Four Seasons hotel in Asia—the Four Seasons Hotel Chinzan-so Tokyo— opened for business on Jan. 16, offering the most spacious standard guest rooms of any hotel in Japan’s capital and views of one of the city’s finest Japanese gardens.
Located in the picturesque Chinzan-so Gardens midway between downtown Tokyo and the new business districts in Shinjuku and Ikebukuro, the 13-story, 286-room luxury hotel also features non-smoking floors, high-tech amphitheater for conferences, the first-ever overseas branch of the noted Bejing restaurant Yang Yuan Zhai and the well-known Italian restaurant “Bice,” a health club with spa using filtered hot-spring water from Izu Peninsula, as well as the usual luxury personal services and hospitality of Four Seasons hotels and resorts worldwide.
The new Tokyo hotel combines the international hotel management and software know-how of Four Season Hotels and the domestic operations and cultural expertise of Fujita Tourist Enterprises to create a five-star international hotel with a sophisticated touch of Japanese culture.
As the building owner, Fujita Tourist Enterprises has invested about ¥34 billion (excluding the cost of land) in the project and will oversee the day-to-day operations of the hotel in accordance with directions, standards, policies and procedures established by Four Seasons, which will also enter the hotel in its centralized reservations system and cooperate in the overseas promotion and sales, according to a company spokesperson.
“Our hotel, with 286 rooms, is small compared with others, but the space and amenities of each guest room are generous and designed to enable every guest to relax and feel as if they were in their own home,” explains Yuji Odagiri, General Manager. He added that the hotel’s primary target is the international business executive whose special needs are foreseen, both for his business meetings and activities, as well as for his needs to relax between such meetings. Odagiri projected sales of about ¥10 billion during 1992.
Isadore Sharp, Chairman and President of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, commented on the occasion of the opening of the Tokyo facilities: “Since the basic business agreement was signed in 1988 between Fuji Tourist Enterprises and Four Seasons, a great deal of time and energy has been spent on the careful development of the Four Seasons Chinzan-so Hotel to ensure that no detail has been overlooked. The hotel draws inspiration from both the East and the West and is devoted to providing the Four Seasons standard of personal service in Japan.”
Four Seasons Hotels currently owns and/or operates 22 other properties in the U.S., Canada, England and the Caribbean and has won many awards for its excellence of service. Recently, the group again received the most awards in the 1991 ranking of the world’s top 75 hotels by The Institutional Investor magazine and also led other hotel organizations with 11 five-diamond awards from the American Automobile Association last year. In the Conde Nast Traveler reader’s pool survey, the magazine ranked six Four Seasons among the Top 10 Hotels in the U.S. and The Four Seasons Washington was on the list of Top 10 Hotels in the world.
Fujita Tourist Enterprises is a major Japanese operator of hotels, restaurants and leisure facilities. President of the company is Masayoshi Matsuzawa. Its interest in developing a luxury quality hotel business in Japan and Four Seasons search for a Japanese partner to expand in Japan as a part of its overseas strategy led to the development of this new hotel in Tokyo.
The Four Seasons Hotel Chinzan-so Tokyo is located at 2-10-8, Sekiguchi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo.
