In his 1999 book Tokyo: A View of the City, the late Donald Richie said of the metropolis, “There are few full-scale, in-your-face frontal views of anything. Except for several shrines and temples, a couple of banks or company headquarters, there is no feeling of frontality at all.”
That’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed with certain buildings, most recently the new Kabukicho Tower in Shinjuku. If you’re approaching it from Shinjuku Station, you can see a frontal view of Kabukicho Tower as you round the corner into Cine City Square from Ichibangai (First Avenue). But at that point, you’re so close up that it almost flattens the building’s design, which is meant to evoke a fountain.
You can take it in better at a slight distance and from an angle, but in Shinjuku, there are other buildings in the way. Yesterday, while walking back to Shinjuku from Shin-Okubo (Koreatown, the next stop on the Yamanote Line), I realized that Kabukicho Tower can be seen much better when coming from that direction. Walking along the train tracks up to Seibu-Shinjuku Station yields a nice view of the tower all along the way.