Otemachi mornings — Aman Tokyo and the district that changed

The Aman Tokyo occupies the top six floors of the Otemachi Tower, which means the lobby is on the thirty-third floor and the windows look down at the Imperial Palace gardens. This is the thing everyone writes about, and it is worth writing about, because the first time you step out of the lift into the six-storey lobby atrium with the wood and the stone and the central arrangement of Japanese flowers the size of a small car, you understand immediately what kind of hotel this is.

But the more interesting thing about the Aman Tokyo is the district it sits in, and what has happened to that district since the hotel opened in 2014.

Otemachi is the financial quarter of Tokyo. It is where the Japanese banks have their head offices, where Mitsubishi's original Marunouchi zaibatsu organisation is still visible in the building names, where the salarymen pour out of the Metro at Otemachi Station in the mornings in numbers that feel, to a foreign visitor, impossible. For most of the post-war period, it has been a district you passed through on your way somewhere else. It had no hotels. It had no serious restaurants. It had no reason to be there unless you worked in a bank.

The opening of the Aman in 2014 began a slow process of turning Otemachi into a place where you might want to spend time. The Four Seasons opened nearby. The Hoshinoya Tokyo — not in Otemachi exactly but two stops north, in Nihonbashi — opened around the same period. A handful of serious restaurants opened in the tower complexes that surround Otemachi Station. Ten years on, the district is still primarily financial, but it is also, now, a place a traveller might deliberately stay.

The morning is when Otemachi is best. This is not a nightlife district and will not become one. But between 6am and 9am, the Imperial Palace gardens are open, the runners who circle the palace's outer moat are out (it is almost exactly five kilometres around, and the unspoken rule is that you run counter-clockwise), the light is clean, and the district has not yet been filled by the rush of commuters. Walk the palace perimeter. Watch the runners. The palace itself is not open to the public, but the East Gardens are, and they are vast and carefully kept and almost empty before nine.

Breakfast at the Aman, if you have the appetite for it, is the Japanese set. Grilled fish, rice, miso, pickles, a soft egg, green tea. Eating it by the window, looking at the palace moat in mid-morning light, is one of the few hotel-breakfast experiences that is worth doing specifically as an experience.

The walk from Otemachi into Marunouchi, the next district over, takes ten minutes and delivers you to the street-level shopping that Tokyo tourists are usually directed to: the Marunouchi Brick Square, the Shin-Marunouchi Building, the Tokyo Station side with its European façade and its newly restored interior. Marunouchi has better shopping than Otemachi; Otemachi has better mornings.

At night, Otemachi empties out. The salarymen disappear into the Metro. The lobby of the Aman, thirty-three floors up, is the quietest lobby of any five-star hotel in Tokyo — not because nothing is happening, but because the district itself has cleared. This is unusual for a city hotel and it is part of what makes the Aman feel different from its Tokyo competitors. The Park Hyatt in Shinjuku, the Four Seasons in Marunouchi, the Peninsula — all are in districts that continue at night. The Aman is in a district that does not.

For a traveller with three nights in Tokyo, the question is not whether to stay in Otemachi but whether to trade the convenience of Shinjuku or the central location of Marunouchi for the specific, quieter proposition of the Aman. The answer depends on what you want Tokyo to be. A city to walk through? Stay in Shinjuku. A city to feel the commerce of? Stay in Marunouchi. A city to observe, from a height, with a palace at your feet and mornings to yourself? Stay in Otemachi.

The Aman is the hotel that decided Otemachi should be a place to stay. A decade on, the district has, slightly, become one. The hotel was both prediction and cause. That is a rare thing for a hotel to be.