I heard from my son that a new hotel and entertainment complex opened last week in Tokyo, the Tokyu Kabukicho Tower. It differs a bit from the usual shopping/entertainment/office building complexes that seem to crop up every few years in Tokyo, which enjoy a burst of gawkers and occasional patrons for a year or two until the next shiny monstrosity arrives - this one has no shopping, not yet anyway. There's a massive food court, two hotels, two live concert/theater halls, a multiplex cinema, and some DJ nighttime entertainment space, the concept of which I'm too old to grasp.

The Kabukicho I have known was never a place for food courts and DJs for tourists. It has been probably the closest thing in Tokyo that you could call a "rough area", though, for anyone who's had any modicum of experience in urban environments, it might be more apt to call it "rough around the edges". You'd have had to be looking for trouble to find any.

Not having been to Kabukicho in veritable ages, I naturally assumed that this new Kabukicho Tower thingy was the first shot fired in some civic/business plan to gentrify the area. Little did I know that the shot was fired in 2015 with the opening of the Shinjuku Toho Building, the end result of a government plan from 2005 to redevelop the central part of Kabukicho and replace the at-the-time fading Shinjuku Koma Theater, which eventually closed in 2008 after over 50 years of Kabuki, J-Pop, and most famously, Enka performances. (The origin of the area's name, by the way, has something to do with the original area planners' unsuccessful hopes to lure Ginza's Kabuki-za theater to relocate to the area.)

The Toho Building too has a hotel, and according to my son, the large number of rooms now available in Kabukicho is mainly to cater to growing numbers of Chinese tourists, which predominate among the foreign visitors to the area. I'm not sure what attracts them to the area in particular, but I do find it interesting considering that Kabukicho's seedy entertainment district roots are in large part down to Taiwanese businessmen who purchased a lot of land around the area beginning in the early 1950s and what they decided to do with their holdings.

The photos shown here were taken on an April day in 2005, and while there was no intention of capturing Kabukicho itself in particular, they do provide a small picture of how it once was and perhaps won't quite be again due to the changes that were set in motion that same year.