My shot of the Sony building, 1992.  © PJ Croft 2016

From The Guardian:   For half a century, the Sony Building in Tokyo has attracted domestic and foreign tourists to the upmarket Ginza district. The flagship building went up in 1966 at a time when the high-rise megalopolis that would eventually provide the setting for Blade Runner and the inspiration for Akira was still in its infancy, and displayed world-changing products such as the Walkman and Trinitron TV.

Now, the consumer electronics company plans to demolish its own flagship store and temporarily replace it with a park. The loss of Yoshinobu Ashihara’s building will be felt in a Tokyo that constantly demolishes and rebuilds, wiping out its architectural heritage. But in a city like Tokyo where public space is woefully lacking – most of it indoors and devoted to retail – an urban oasis could actually help the city, not to mention the once-mighty company’s struggling brand.

Brutal and concrete from the outside, the Sony Building’s interior is something entirely different. Typical of Ashihara’s other buildings from this period, it has multiple-level floors that defy the conventions of the common retail complex. “I made the entire interior space continuous by placing 27 floors on successive different levels,” the architect wrote of the building. The result is a store where floors spiral round, like a staircase.

I was there in 1992. I went through this Sony building.

This was in the days of analogue High Definition TV broadcasting. MUSE they called it, Multiple Sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding. Japan had HD TV in the early 1990s, ten years before us.

Problem was, it was analogue and before its time. Europe came up with DVB-T, Digital Video Broadcast-Terrestrial and it was goodbye Japan.