On the evening of December 21, a packed Hikarie Hall in Shibuya played host to the inaugural Love Tokyo Awards ceremony, which saw winners crowned in a total of seven categories: Restaurant, Café, Bar, Shop, Product, Activity and Face of Tokyo.
Over the past few months, local experts from across the global Time Out network descended on Tokyo and joined our own ace team in picking out the very best of the capital. After countless sleepless nights and heated debates, our judges finally decided on the winners in the five major categories, while we here at Time Out Tokyo narrowed down the Activity and Face of Tokyo lists to, respectively, five and six final picks.
Once the criteria had been made clear, it was at last time to announce the award recipients. Read on for a recap of all those who triumphed, complete with comments from the winners themselves.
First up was Best Café, which was awarded to green tea and wagashi specialist Higashiya. A tea salon that puts a fresh twist on traditional Japanese confectionery, it’s a spot relaxing enough for hours of lingering in busy Ginza.
Accepting the award, Higashiya representative Shizu Sakihama said her team, who also run a shop in Aoyama, were honoured to win and hope to continue pushing their vision of fusing traditional Japanese culture with modern lifestyles.
Next, the coveted Best Bar award was picked up by Bar Oak at the Tokyo Station Hotel. Our judges were particularly impressed with master Hisashi Sugimoto, who mixes up his signature Tokyo Station cocktails in a room that incorporates red bricks and wood in the décor, matching perfectly with the newly renovated station’s exterior.
PR representative Junko Hama from the Tokyo Station Hotel also highlighted Sugimoto’s contribution in her acceptance speech, recounting how the veteran barman arrived in Tokyo at the age of 20 and soon started working at the Oak, where he’s still manning the bar – 55 years after first taking up the position. Furthermore, Hama mentioned that the seemingly never-ending construction mess in front of the station will finally be cleaned up in 2017, making the views from Bar Oak even better.
Perhaps the biggest applause of the night was reserved for Tokyobike, the Yanaka-born bicycle specialist that's been knocking out simple, attractive rides since 2002 and was now honoured with a Best Product award. Our judges loved their concept of comfort above speed, ideally put together for the local life.
Tokyobike president Ichiro Kanai stepped up to the podium to look back at his brand’s 15-year history, emphasising how he had wanted to raise the status of bicycles ‘to the same level as trains and buses’. Mentioning the new Tokyobike Rentals project, Kanai encouraged Tokyoites to explore the city from the back of a bike: ‘It’ll give you an entirely new perspective from which to look at the city.’
Retail classic Isetan Shinjuku walked away with Best Shop – a bit of a surprise maybe, but certainly deserved for what is arguably the trendiest department store in Japan, also renowned for having its window displays created by leading artists. Thanking the judges, manager Masaaki Takano from the Mitsukoshi Isetan Group wasn’t about to give in to the pessimists who are pronouncing the end of the era of department stores.
‘We’ve been around for 130 years now – over 80 of those in Shinjuku. Although we refurbished the store completely three years ago and saw customers from 120 countries visit in 2015, we still think we can do better.’
And what about the highly anticipated Best Restaurant award? It went to Kitafuku Ginza, an exhilarating crab purveyor that earned universal acclaim from our judges. A meal here lasts at least two hours, which is the minimum time necessary for a live king crab to be deshelled, systematically dismantled – leg by leg, claw by claw – and feasted upon boiled, charcoal-grilled and raw.
Kitafuku co-owner Yuichiro Nakasone was delighted to take home the inaugural Best Restaurant honour and looked back at how he fell in love with the delicious crustacean: ‘Before opening Kitafuku, I’d travel to Sapporo with my friends to eat crab. There, I met a chef who taught me the value of preparing the entire thing in front of your customers.’
‘This experience made me want to emphasise the performance aspect of it all. In the future, I hope we can make the Japanese style of eating crab a global export, just like sushi.’ We can only wish the Kitafuku team luck in their endeavour.
Once the five main categories were done and dusted, things moved on to Face of Tokyo – our picks of six creative people who helped make the city a better place in 2016. First in line was Hoshino Resorts CEO Yoshiharu Hoshino, who oversaw the opening of Hoshinoya Tokyo in July. This luxurious traditional-style inn sits right in the heart of Tokyo, boasts its own natural hot spring and successfully brings the onsen ryokan experience to the capital.
Although Hoshino couldn’t make it to the ceremony in person, he was kind enough to send over a video message. Happy to be recognised in Tokyo, where his company had been only a minor player before last year, Hoshino highlighted one of our city’s unique strengths: ‘I believe that Tokyo will remain one of the world’s most competitive and attractive big cities, but it’s also clear that it is different from its rivals – due to it being very Japanese.’
The next Face of Tokyo winner was Kris Yoshie, director of the Slow Label collective, which works to empower people with disabilities and advance their integration into society. Their art project, ‘Slow Movement’, was a surprise hit at this year’s Roppongi Art Night, while Kris herself also had a hand in Japan’s refreshingly diverse ‘handover’ show performed at the Rio Paralympics closing ceremony.
A born and bred Tokyoite, Yoshie mentioned how an illness in 2010 left her right leg disabled. This misfortune led her to realise how Tokyo still wasn’t a very accommodating city for people with disabilities, but also encouraged her to work on changing that state of affairs – especially after seeing the 2012 London Paralympics transform the British capital into a more open metropolis.
In her acceptance speech, Yoshie said she’s confident ‘Tokyo will become an even more exciting city, one that encourages diversity and is on the cutting edge of incorporating the needs of minorities’ in the lead-up to 2020.
Our third Face of Tokyo was lawyer Takahiro Saito, who was a major player in the 2016 overturning of Japan’s antiquated ‘no dancing’ law. Having lobbied for reform since 2012, Saito won over an impressive cast of entrepreneurs, artists and politicians, initiating a movement that eventually became too funky for the authorities to resist.
Mentioning Time Out’s coverage of the fueiho, as the now-amended law is known in Japanese, Saito told the story of how the reform process got started and stressed the importance of a healthy nightlife culture for a city like Tokyo: ‘Beyond dancing, I hope this reform gives the entire night-time entertainment scene a boost.’ And what is the good lawyer planning to take on next? ‘Visa regulations. To make Tokyo an even more exciting city, we need to make it easier to attract creative people from abroad, and I hope to be able to help build the legal infrastructure necessary for that.’
After the announcements of anime director Makoto Shinkai and musical multi-talent Sheena Ringo as Faces of Tokyo four and five – neither could make it to the ceremony due to other commitments – it was time for our last winner: eccentric artist extraordinaire Takashi Murakami. Taking the stage in a Christian Dada pinstripe suit and a hairdo that defies description, the otaku icon immediately got the crowd fired up.
Murakami had his hands full in 2016, and not just with a paintbrush: his critically acclaimed ‘The 500 Arhats’ show attracted over 300,000 visitors during its run at the Mori Museum, while an exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art showcased the ‘Superflat’ progenitor’s highly eclectic collection of art. After mentioning his exploits as the cover boy of our Spring 2016 issue, Murakami spoke of how his art still quite hasn’t been embraced on these shores: ‘Maybe being honoured in Japan by an international-minded publication like Time Out helps Japanese people realise that looking at my art won’t hurt them!’
For the full list of winners, complete with comments from our team of judges, check out the Winners page over at the dedicated awards site. The Love Tokyo Awards will be back even bigger and better in 2017, so stay tuned...