LaQua

The newly opened LaQua looks like an amusement park, doesn’t it?
Only from this angle. There are also 46 stores and 19 restaurants area, a fitness gym and a spa that includes baths filled with hot spring water they drilled for specially. Nestled between Tokyo Dome and the Bunkyo ward office, this is another of the city’s new “urban destinations.”
LaQua opened yesterday and I dragged Tod out to have a peek. We had lunch at Maharaja and afterwards I walked through the mall to see what it was all about. More of the same as everywhere else, really, but I will be able to reduce the number of trips to Shinjuku and Shibuya.
The rollercoaster, the Thunder Dolphin, makes a double loop around the roof and through the center of the hubless Ferris wheel at a breakneck 130 km/h. The entire building shakes when it goes past–in one store, a display of glasses toasted one another with chattering clinks every few minutes.
At 1,000 yen a ride, Tod calculated that they take in 480,000 yen an hour on a busy day. That works out to about 15 million USD a year if they are at full capacity on 300 days.
I’ll bet the ward office civil servants are already weary of the people screaming past their windows every 3 minutes.