The museum on the tower's 52nd and 53rd floors features Japan's first foreign curator, an Englishman, and is networking with some of the world's leading art museums. An exhibit next summer is a collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Up-and-coming artists may find an outlet at Roppongi Hills. The museum already produced a CD called "Open Mind," which compiles annoyingly scratchy digital sounds from Japanese "cyberartists."
A roofed outdoor stage is also billed as an entertainment space for less-established performers.
But visitors looking for a genuine flavor of Japan will do better to visit Kyoto to the west -- the ancient capital filled with temples and rock gardens that are sheer geniuses of design.
Other segments of Tokyo are brimming with Japonesque as well.
The Omotesando district gathers boutiques by internationally acclaimed designers such as Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake -- and the artsy crowd who frequent the area.
Nearby Harajuku is a cluster of kitsch with its outdoor waffle stands, teens in garish cartoonish costumes and stores bursting with knickknacks catering to street-fashion tastes.
The Ginza -- a trendsetter during decades of modernization -- now looks downright quaint with its old-fashioned department stores. One has a bronze lion sitting at the entrance.
With Louis Vuitton and Tiffany and Co next to bonsai and kimono shops, the Ginza still manages to be Japanese, heavy on the nostalgia for the go-go years of growth when McDonald's and rock 'n' roll symbolized freedom imported from the West.
Roppongi Hills will also be competing against similar plush Mori offerings in Tokyo, such as the 1986 Ark Hills, which has a concert hall with superb acoustics, and the Atago Green Hills, an office and residential complex finished last year.
The competition doesn't stop there.
Tokyo has been undergoing such a development rush lately, new office-hotel-retail areas are popping up almost everywhere one turns.
And the Hills will remain just blocks away from a sobering reality -- the rest of dumpy, down-and-out Roppongi.
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