hen Shinji Hamauzu quit working for Zozo Group, one of Japan’s leading fashion retailers, in early 2020, he told his friends he wanted to go into the hotel business. Everyone advised him against it. ‘This was in the middle of Tokyo’s Covid lockdown and everyone thought I was crazy,’ he says. Hamauzu persevered. He wasn’t planning on ‘just’ building and running yet another hotel. He wanted to do things differently, and to highlight this, and partly
