This has got to be one of the strangest views from the balcony: a driving school. Not that driving schools are strange in Japan; what’s strange is that it is located smack in the middle of a heavily crowded urban center. A two-story structure, it is the lowest building in the neighborhood, surrounded by a towering Sunshine 60 complex (that’s the entrance to the Prince Hotel above it), and the dozen-story-tall NTT and post office buildings, as well as other tall buildings.

These driving schools do charge a lot of money–it usually costs about ¥300,000 ($2500) for a three-week-or-so training course–but it can’t be enough to really justify taking up so much space in a prime real estate location. This must be one of those throwbacks, something owned for so long with property taxes so low that it doesn’t cost the owner much to exist–but selling the land would incur prohibitive taxes because of that financial gain relative to the original purchase price.

Not that I’m complaining–were it sold, it would likely be replaced by yet another view-blocking high-rise. It’s just a strange anomaly, is all.

Other interesting bits viewed from the balcony:

You get to see how people use their roof space. It must be really nice to have this balcony in the summer time, when it’s not raining, that is.

Little bits of the city congeal to form pockets of light at night; this grouping caught my attention, far away enough that I could not make it out by eye. The “Pioneer” sign is now dark, a small while after I took the photo.

(Click to enlarge.) As I think I might have mentioned before, we can get a direct view down Sunshine 60 street, a pedestrian shopping street with theaters and other shops like Tokyu Hands.

I was wondering why people on a high floor of the NTT building were looking back out at me, until I saw closer up:

It must be the NTT cafeteria.