Tokyo Midtown Nihonbashi tops out, with Waldorf Astoria's Japan debut on its top floors

Mitsui Fudosan and Nomura Real Estate Development have finished structural work on Tokyo Midtown Nihonbashi, a 284-metre, 52-storey riverside tower that adds roughly 20,000 square metres of new Tokyo retail space, brings Hilton's Waldorf Astoria brand to Japan for the first time, and sends the long-running COREDO Nihonbashi mall into a year-long closure for renewal, the developers said in a joint release dated October 8.

The tower — called the Nihonbashi Nomura Mitsui Tower and the centrepiece of a four-block redevelopment — reached structural completion on September 30, according to the release. Its roughly 20,000 square metres of shops and restaurants, about 100 units in all, run across three connected zones: the tower itself (basement to third floor), an adjoining south building (basement to fourth floor) and a riverside terrace (first and second floors), linked by decks and underground passages. COREDO Nihonbashi, the retail complex already on the site, closes on October 15 and will reopen within 2027 as part of the renewed commercial zone.

Above the retail and office floors, the tower's upper levels house Waldorf Astoria Tokyo Nihonbashi — Hilton's top-tier luxury brand making its Japan debut — with 197 rooms across floors 39 to 47 (guest floors 40 to 47), three restaurants, a lounge and bar, an indoor pool, spa, fitness centre, banquet rooms and a chapel. Floors 48 to 51 hold Waldorf Astoria Residences Tokyo Nihonbashi, 71 private units ranging from about 60 to 430 square metres, which the release describes as the brand's first residential property in the Asia-Pacific region.

Floors five to eight hold a MICE facility that Mitsui Fudosan calls the largest in central Tokyo, comprising two roughly 1,500-square-metre halls that each seat about 1,600 people, twelve conference rooms totalling about 1,400 square metres, and a roughly 1,000-square-metre foyer, run in partnership with the Nihonbashi tourism body DMO TOKYO Nihonbashi for local food, culture and accommodation services; it opens in October 2027. Office floors above are anchored by Nomura Holdings and Daiichi Sankyo, which will each base their headquarters there, and by Bank of America's Japan operations, with further tenants said to follow. A separate, lower building on the site, the Nihonbashi Nomura Building Old Wing, keeps a Chuo ward-registered historic facade, repurposed at street level as retail space.

The project is the first phase of an 11-hectare riverside redevelopment Mitsui Fudosan calls Nihonbashi River Walk, with the full district's grand opening planned within 2027 once the south building's renovation is also complete. For a neighbourhood built on finance and wholesale trade, the stakes are less about adding floor space than about what replaces it: COREDO Nihonbashi's closure takes an established retail draw off the map for well over a year, and the tower's new 100 units will need to prove they can pull shoppers back once the district reopens — all while an ultra-luxury hotel brand new to Japan tests how much demand Nihonbashi itself can generate, rather than borrowing it from Ginza or Marunouchi next door.