Sompo Japan Building

A 43-story, 200-meter office skyscraper completed in 1976 in Nishi-Shinjuku as the Yasuda Fire and Marine headquarters. Winner of the 19th BCS Award, it stands out for its curved facade among the predominantly grid-faced towers of West Shinjuku.

Use

Office tower

Area

Shinjuku City

Completed

1976

Floors

43 above ground, 6 below

Height

200 m

A Curved Tower Among Straight Lines

Walk west from Shinjuku Station, cross Ome-Kaido Avenue, and the Nishi-Shinjuku high-rise district unfolds on either side. Most of the towers here present flat curtain-wall grids to the street. One building does not. The Sompo Japan Building — 43 floors above ground, six below, 200 meters tall — has a gently curved facade that sets it apart from its neighbors at a glance. It opened in May 1976 as the headquarters of Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance, having been completed in April of that year by a joint venture of Taisei Corporation, Shimizu Corporation, and Konoike Construction. It went on to receive the 19th BCS Award, the annual prize of the Building Contractors Society of Japan.

The building’s place in the timeline of Nishi-Shinjuku is close to the beginning. The Kasumigaseki Building in Chiyoda Ward had established Tokyo’s first modern skyscraper in 1968; the Keio Plaza Hotel followed in Nishi-Shinjuku in 1971. The Yasuda Fire Building arrived in 1976, during the district’s formative years, and its address at 1-26-1 Nishi-Shinjuku still anchors the southern edge of the high-rise zone.

A Facade That Has Lasted Fifty Years

The curved front elevation remains the building’s most recognizable feature. In an era when the dominant vocabulary of tall office buildings was the vertical-and-horizontal grid, the Yasuda Fire Building chose something different — a surface that reads as slightly convex, giving the tower a silhouette that resists easy categorization among its neighbors. Approaching from Shinjuku Station on foot, or looking back at the cluster from the far side of Ome-Kaido, that outline is reliably identifiable even now, fifty years on.

Near the top of the tower, on the 42nd floor, the SOMPO Museum of Art occupies space that was formerly the Togo Seiji Art Museum. A serious collection of Western paintings housed at 200 meters above street level, reached by elevator from the lobby, makes the building something more than a corporate address. The combination of a BCS Award-winning exterior and a dedicated art museum on the upper floors has given the Sompo Japan Building a cultural dimension that most office towers of its generation do not share.

The building’s name has changed with its tenants. It opened as the Yasuda Fire and Marine Headquarters Building, became the Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Headquarters Building following successive corporate mergers, and was renamed the Sompo Japan Building in 2020. The curved facade has not changed at all.

Summary

The Sompo Japan Building was completed in 1976, with 43 floors above ground and a height of 200 meters. Its BCS Award-winning curved facade remains a distinctive landmark in Nishi-Shinjuku, and the SOMPO Museum of Art on the 42nd floor adds a cultural dimension rare among buildings of its type. From Shinjuku Station’s West Exit, a short walk along Ome-Kaido is all it takes to find this curved tower standing among its straight-lined neighbors — look up, and its half-century of presence in the skyline becomes immediately clear.

Related: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building No.1 / Shinjuku Sumitomo Building / Shinjuku Park Tower

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