Tokyo’s Hottest New Hotel Is a Black Tea-Scented Oasis in the Heart of Ginza

It is a strange thing to travel 6,000 miles across the globe and feel nowhere in particular. Ginza, an upscale shopping district with the highest concentration of Western boutiques in Tokyo, is much like any other metropolitan center. The high-rises are as awe-inspiring as those in Shanghai, the neon-lit crossings as glittering and hectic as Times Square, the shop fronts as lustrous as those lining the Champs-Élysées. To stroll past the behemoth department stores on Chuo-dori Street is to be anywhere in the world; the sheer scope and sameness of it all, all-consuming. But take a chance turn and you will find yourself thrust into the narrow side streets of a storybook Tokyo, where historic ramen vendors and fogged-up dive bars are illuminated beneath traditional Akachōchin lanterns. It is there, on an unassuming street corner, that you will find the latest property from Edition Hotels.

With just 86 guest rooms, The Tokyo Edition, Ginza is a perfect jewel box of a hotel—its older sister in Toranomon, which opened in 2020, boasts 206 rooms spread across 31 floors—and it seems to have been constructed with the express purpose of providing high-net-worth individuals with the rarest of all luxuries: peace, discretion, and a sense of anonymity. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, whose buildings are best known for their swoops of cedarwood and retina-glitching metalwork (among them Japan’s National Stadium and the V&A Museum in Dundee), its glass facade is latticed with aluminum beams, while the curtains draped behind them are just opaque enough to emit a mysterious warm glow onto the pavement. Inside, an immediate reset to the nervous system: a dark walnut and plush cream lounge suffused with that same black tea aroma—a bespoke Le Labo scent—that envelops all 19 of the Edition’s properties.

There are, after all, some benefits to finding familiarity in a foreign place, and The Tokyo Edition, Ginza retains all of its siblings’ most beloved signatures. The wood-paneled rooms—more than spacious by Tokyo’s diminutive standards—are rendered in soothing neutrals with enormous showers and marble-topped bathroom counters. Guests return from breakfast in the light-dappled Sophie restaurant—a European brasserie offering matcha french toast topped with red bean paste in the morning and Wagyu steak au poivre in the evening—to find a sumptuous throw has been arranged with an air of deliberate déshabillé across their beds. It’s a touch that says so much about a hotel brand built on the casual hedonism of Studio 54. (The Edition’s founder, Ian Schrager, established and ran the world-famous nightclub alongside Steve Rubell until it closed down in 1980.)

To that point: there are few places on earth that will bring together quite as many pleasure-seeking aesthetes as one of Schrager’s properties. And on its opening night, The Tokyo Edition, Ginza played host to his glamorous entourage, including DJ Peggy Gou, Got7’s Jackson Wang, Dita Von Teese, Blackpink’s artistic director Verdy and the fashion designer Tomo Koizumi. At these launch events, the Edition’s buildings are known to take on the atmosphere of a decadent frat house. The panoramic Sophie was repurposed as DJ Nick Grimshaw’s dance floor; the low-lit Punch Room—which has all the class of an old boy’s club without the ruddy-nosed lounge lizards—served ryokucha tea and sake-infused cocktails; and the hotel’s lush rooftop enclaves provided views above and beyond the neighborhood’s low-slung architecture, as if perched on the edge of a vast and twinkling urban jungle.

This is, perhaps, the sort of late-night bacchanalia that The Tokyo Edition, Toranomon is better suited for. (The hotel is quite literally built on a nightclub, which its neighboring guests in Ginza are free to visit, alongside its state-of-the-art gyms, conservatory-style swimming pools, and Scandinavian spas.) It’s a point worth remembering when deciding between these two hotels: if Toranomon is the Edition’s first-class ocean liner, then consider Ginza a snug port in the storm, nestled as it is between LVMH flagships, the district’s Kabuki theatres and all those ancient sushi counters still operating from where the Tsukiji fish market once stood. The Tokyo Edition, Ginza sits on these precise fault lines—between tradition and modernity—like a Bonsai emerging from concrete sprawl. I arrived in Tokyo feeling as though I could be anywhere in the world, and I left knowing that there is, in fact, nowhere quite like it.