The  “New Tokyo Tower”, Tokyo Skytree will be opening tomorrow today (May 22nd JST). It’s the tallest tower in the world now, standing at 634 metres (2,080 ft) high.

I went to the pre-opening party at the neighboring Tokyo Soramachi mall and had a quick look around. Although I didn’t get to go into the tower it was great to visit the new structures on a day before the opening day.

Tokyo Soramachi on the left, and the Skytree on the right.

Here’s the inside view of Soramachi. I read that they are expecting 200k people (!) on the opening day alone. Compared to that it was not crowded at all. We joked and said we were pretty much assigned to do a stress test for their operation team 🙂

I found several stores I want to go back. This one is called “TOKYO10月 H.P.FRANCE”.

Skytree Tower entrance – They got everything ready now, looks like.

We had some craft beer and food at a restaurant called “World Beer Museum”. The name is cheesy but I did like the food & their selection of beer. My favorite from tonight is the Belgium beer called Bruges Zot (not the one pictured below – I liked the hedgehog mascot on this one).

If you are visiting from outside of Tokyo or Japan, I think it’s a good place for looking for interesting gifts. Their selection of shops was really nice – it’s focused toward tourists but that meant recent Japanese product design trends were well reflected. The overall spatial design in the Soramachi building also felt very modern.

View from the 31st floor of Soramachi.

For more photos, visit my Flickr set.