Japan's Mori is bringing its mixed-use style to the mainland with the development of the off plan property in China Shanghai's World Financial Center. Clean, green and glassy, the Roppongi Hills building epitomizes a new Tokyo style so much that Hollywood regularly uses it as a backdrop - most effectively in Lost in Translation. In the Bill Murray film, as in reality, executives and filmmakers lounge in the lobby of the five-star Hyatt while chic Japanese shop for cosmetics and couture below floors of well-appointed offices, all in an architecturally pleasing building.

The setting sounds like a snug fit for Shanghai, where surging economic growth is lifting demand and rents for grade-A office space.

After successfully replicating the Hills mixed-use model around Japan, Mori Building Group, Japan's largest privately-owned developer, is bringing it to Shanghai, China's most glamorous city.

The World Financial Center (WFC) in Shanghai's Pudong financial district was designed by New York firm Kohn Pedersen Fox and built by a joint venture between China Construction and Engineering and Shanghai Construction Group. At 101 stories, or half a kilometer, tall, it will be the mainland's tallest building when it opens in 2008.

RETURN TO THE FRAY
Japanese developers have been quiet in China since Mori opened the Senmao Tower (now the HSBC Tower) in Shanghai in 1998, particularly compared to their Hong Kong counterparts.

But there's been a new surge of design-driven Japanese properties recently.

Rockefeller, a real estate subsidiary of conglomerate Mitsubishi, is working on a 94,000 square-meter mixed-use complex of apartments, shops and a boutique hotel in Shanghai's new Waitanyuan area, just north of the Bund. Completion is scheduled for 2009 though reports of forced evictions of locals have sullied the project's image.

Mitsui, Japan's largest developer, opened the Xi'an Garden Hotel in Xi'an, which is small beans next to its 461 Fifth Avenue Building in New York.

Lately the company has been exploring opportunities in the high-end Chinese residential market, a spokesperson said. The company will use its know-how in Japan's design-conscious residential market to "create new business opportunities".

China is hungry for Japanese standards of style and hospitality, says Frank Zhu, head of marketing at the Japanese-run Okura Garden Hotel Shanghai.