Much has been written in recent years about the transformation of the Roppongi district of central Tokyo from a seedy neighborhood catering to the late-night pleasures of the city's expatriate community, as well as off-duty soldiers from American military bases, into its leading center for international culture and commerce. The dives that fan out from Roppongi crossing where bouncers, pushers and women offering "messagi" are still to be found plying their respective trades each night are being squeezed now more than ever, not by the police or ubiquitous patrols by Japan's chapter of the Guardian Angels but by the far more persuasive and convincing force of flashy new residential and commercial infrastructure projects. First among them is Roppongi Hills, a sprawling mixed-used development, the largest privately funded urban redevelopment project ever undertaken in Japan, and its centerpiece Mori Tower that opened in Spring 2003 after close to 15 years of planning and preparation and three years of construction backed by Tokyo's most powerful real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori.

The fact that Roppongi is wedged between so many of Tokyo's high-end neighborhoods, including the government and commercial centers of Chiyoda, Minato and Chuo wards and upscale residential neighborhoods like Azabu-Juban, Nogizaka and Hiroo has long meant that Roppongi's days of libidinous notoriety were numbered. Though not all have welcomed this turn of events, with many critics bemoaning the preening consumerism that the area now boasts in spades, there can be little doubt that the Roppongi is now Tokyo's flashiest and perhaps also its most important center for the arts.

Roppongi's numerous venues for contemporary visual arts include the Mori Art Museum located on the 52nd floor of Mori Tower, well-respected galleries including Hiromi Yoshii, Koyanagi and Ota Fine Arts, the major new art museum National Art Center Tokyo that is scheduled to open in January 2007 and the new Suntory Museum of Art that is part of the Tokyo Midtown project, a mix-use commercial and residential complex scheduled to open next year and built by Mitsui Fudosan, the country's largest construction company, that's own centerpiece 54 story tower has risen in recent months to its full height only a few thousand meters from Roppongi Hills.

Given the enormous amount of recent development, and the fact that foreign visitors to Japan have adopted the Roppongi area as their primary hub in Tokyo, it is perhaps of little surprise that the Tokyo International Film Festival made the decision in 2004 for the 17th annual TIFF be based both at its longtime home in Shibuya's Bunkamura cultural center and for the first time at the Roppongi Hills' newly opened Virgin Toho Cinemas. This year's TIFF is focusing even more on holding its primary activities in Roppongi, with TIFFCOM (the festival's content market), Tokyo Project Gathering (a forum designed for filmmakers to pitch new projects to potential financial backers), Location Market (a symposium held to introduce Japan as a potential shooting location) and Seminar@TIFFCOM 2006 (a forum focusing on discussions of contemporary Asian cinema and the region's film market) all set to be held in the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower convention facilities.

It seems clear that TIFF's decision to return this year to Roppongi Hills is the result of efforts by organizers to make the event ever more international in its focus. Shibuya, where the Festival has long been centered, is home the majority of the city's art house theatres and local independent film industry. But while Shibuya remains the center of cinema in Tokyo, as well as this city's most famous brand of youth culture, Roppongi Hills is the self-professed international mecca of the modern city. A conscious effort has been made by developers to make the complex as easy to use by foreigners as it is for Japanese, a rare case in a city still widely considered (on the whole unfairly) to be a challenge to navigate for those without basic Japanese language skills. Signs, directories and pamphlets are all printed in Japanese and English and a great number of staff members at the complex's restaurants, cafes, retails shops, hotel, art museum, cinemas and even its medical center are bilingual as well. That has all lent Roppongi Hills a kind of transparency that has made it one of Tokyo's biggest attractions for visitors.

All of this is sure to benefit the Tokyo International Film festival, which despite screening an impressive range of films from across the globe, attracting some of the world's most important industry players on and off the screen and enjoying a budget drawn from public and private institutions that equals that of Cannes has had difficulty since its inception gaining notice and prestige outside of Japan. But it remains the largest and oldest film event of its kind in Asia, and with its presence again this year at Roppongi Hills as the area continues to establish itself as Tokyo's best known and most easily accessible draws for foreign visitors, one can only hope that TIFF has finally arrived at the venue it needs in order to take its place among the world's most important international film events.