Conspicuous Consumption Shapes New Tokyo Skyline

Income Disparity Raises Demand for Public Housing

Mori's glimmering Roppongi Hills development boasts $50,000-a-month apartments and a parade of luxury stores. (By Katsumi Kasahara -- Associated Press)

TOKYO -- From his lofty perch inside Roppongi Hills -- the city within a city he built into the ultimate playground for Japan's mega-rich -- real estate magnate Minoru Mori reigns as the king of luxury in the world's largest metropolis.

Roppongi Hills boasts $50,000-a-month apartments, escalators encased in glass domes, a museum stocked with masterworks and a parade of luxury stores representing half of Milan and Paris. It is also the pièce de résistance of Mori's six "compact cities," glittering projects where some of the winners of Japan's roaring economic comeback live, work, shop, eat and play.

Mori's success has sparked a host of similar projects for the super-rich that are dramatically altering the physical look of Tokyo -- long known for its cramped, "Blade Runner"-like cityscape of towering video screens, glaring neon and cookie-cutter office buildings. But the projects are only one part of what sociologists and economists are calling a major shift in the social architecture of the capital.

On the flip side are a proliferation of Rest Box hotels, where Tokyo's less well-heeled seek out warm bunk beds at $14 a night, and a sharp increase in demand for public housing. Even as the area's population growth has stagnated, the number of applicants for each low-income housing unit has nearly doubled in the past four years. Meanwhile, many people have turned for rest to 24-hour comic book cafes, where a night in a reclining chair with all-you-can-drink coffee and corn soup costs about $13.

Stark lifestyle differences may be nothing new for most of the world's major urban centers, but they mark a relatively new twist in Japan. In a nation that once prided itself on being a one-class society, where chief executives didn't earn that much more than their middle managers, Tokyo's increasingly polarized lifestyles have become part of a furious debate here over a growing income gap.

"We are seeing our society divided up by income," said Masahiro Yamada, a sociologist at Tokyo Gakugei University. "If we keep going like this, we will see the creation of slums in Tokyo even as more places like Roppongi Hills go up for those with extraordinary incomes."

As Japan's economy has rumbled back from a recession that lasted more than a decade, a crop of younger, contrarian Japanese has blazed a trail of conspicuous consumption in a nation where the wealthy once prided themselves on their subtlety. Takafumi Horie, a 33-year-old Internet tycoon, was the epitome of Japan's new hotshots -- until his arrest in January on corporate fraud charges. Using a small start-up company as leverage, he staged hostile takeovers and built a multibillion-dollar enterprise. But he became better known for roaring out of the garage of his $22,000-a-month apartment at Roppongi Hills behind the wheel of his silver Ferrari. "There is nothing money can't buy," he famously said last year.

While wealth in Japan is still more equally distributed than in, say, the United States, statistics show the gap is widening. In 2002, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the richest 20 percent of Japanese earned 50.4 percent of the nation's wealth, compared with 48.8 percent in 1999 and 44.3 percent in 1987. The poorest 20 percent were earning only 0.3 percent of the wealth in 2002, compared with 0.8 percent in 1999 and 2.7 percent in 1987.

People whose income ranks in the middle 30 percent are earning a smaller percentage of the country's total than before. "The Japanese middle class is collapsing," said Makoto Yuasa, secretary general of Moyai, a nonprofit organization that helps Tokyo's poor.

The reasons for the shift remain in dispute, with opponents of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi citing his reform efforts, which have forced banks to come down harder on debtors and eliminated massive pork-barrel spending that had created a trickledown effect of wealth.

Others blame the rise of the generation of Japanese who grew up in the 1990s disillusioned by the burst of the economic bubble in 1991 and lacking in education and training.

Yamada, the sociologist, said well-paying jobs were plentiful for most of the Japanese workforce during the period of its economic dominance in the 1980s, known as the bubble years. Today, despite a low unemployment rate and Japan's steady economic growth, many young Japanese find themselves working in lower-paying jobs with little security and long hours, even as others have found ways to get in on the new gravy train.