The facade of the Mitsui main building has a neat row of colonnades on which Corinthian orders are mounted

Facade of the main Mitsui building — Mitsui Main Building

Around the Chuo-dori Street area of Nihonbashi, there is a row of magnificent stone buildings: the Mitsukoshi Nihonbashi Main Store, completed in 1914, and the Mitsui Main Building, completed in 1929, stand across the road, and behind the Mitsui Main Building, seen from Chuo-dori Street, stands the Bank of Japan Main Store, designed by Kingo Tatsuno and completed in 1896. Although there are other large buildings in the vicinity, it is the stone buildings that give the area its stately historical atmosphere. Fortunately, it was not destroyed in air raids during World War II, and together with the Nihonbashi Nomura Building (completed in 1930) and the Nihonbashi Takashimaya Department Store (completed in 1932) on the other side of Nihonbashi, it still conveys the glamour of pre-war Tokyo.

The stone building in the photograph is the Mitsui Main Building in Nihonbashi Muromachi. It is said to have cost about 10 times as much as a typical office building at the time, under the president's order to build something that would not be destroyed even if something twice as large as the Great Kanto Earthquake hit the city. The facade, with its neat rows of colonnades on which Corinthian orders ride, filled the viewfinder, and if you only looked there, it looked like a street corner in New York (or London, if you prefer).

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