The hotel bar has long played a pivotal role in films, serving as a cinematic crossroads where chance encounters, confessions and transformations unfold. For a generation enraptured by Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation , that place is the New York Bar at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, the liminal space where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s characters find connection in their loneliness and sameness as strangers in a strange land.

Unlike the many fictionalized hotel bars that have appeared in film and television, the New York Bar is very real. Perched on the 52nd floor of Shinjuku Park Tower, designed by Pritzker Prize winner Kenzō Tange it hovers above the city, and through its 360-degree, floor-to-ceiling windows stretch cinematic views of the Tokyo skyline. Jazz floats through

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