The Japanese asset price bubble of the late 1980s inflated real estate and stock market values to extraordinary heights, and the plans for Rinku Town reflected that confidence. The development on the mainland shore of Osaka Bay, directly opposite the new Kansai International Airport, was to be anchored by matching towers forming a visual gate -- hence the name. Designed by Nikken Sekkei and Yasui Architects & Engineers, the first tower was completed in August 1996, two years after the airport opened. The building rises in three vertical sections: an international conference hall and banquet facilities at the base, business offices in the middle floors, and a hotel occupying the slimmest upper section. Two underground levels provide parking for 365 vehicles. But with the economic miracle deflated, the twin tower concept died, leaving a single pillar standing where a gateway was meant to frame the bridge.

For its first years of operation, the Rinku Gate Tower Building was a beautiful near-vacancy. The office floors sat largely empty -- the building was too far from central Osaka, and the airport itself was underperforming expectations. In 1999, the government of Osaka Prefecture stepped in, relocating a passport office and other administrative functions into the tower to fill the void. The hotel fared little better. Originally operated as the ANA Gate Tower Hotel by an affiliate of All Nippon Airways, the hotel company filed for liquidation in 2005, dragging its parent company -- the building operator -- into restructuring. A consortium led by Shinsei Bank and Kennedix purchased the building at the end of the process. From 2005 to 2011, Osaka Prefecture itself ran the hotel through a government-owned company that hemorrhaged 150 to 400 million yen per year.

Osaka governor Toru Hashimoto finally pushed to privatize the hotel in 2011, and management was handed to Dancin' Diner, a Kansai-region restaurant chain. The property was renamed the Star Gate Hotel Kansai Airport, occupying floors 29 through 54. In December 2012, an affiliate of Hong Kong-listed SiS International Holdings purchased the entire building for 3 billion yen as its first real estate investment in Japan. The price was a fraction of the building's original construction cost -- a measure of how far values had fallen since the bubble years. Today the tower functions as originally intended, if not at the scale originally imagined: hotel guests on the upper floors look out over Osaka Bay toward the airport island, while the 54th-floor observation deck offers a 360-degree panorama that takes in the Sky Gate Bridge, the Rinku Pleasure Town Ferris wheel, and on clear days, the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture to the south.

From the air, the Rinku Gate Tower Building is the most prominent vertical landmark on the southern Osaka Bay shoreline. At 256 meters, it surpasses everything in the vicinity and ranks behind only Azabudai Hills Mori JP Tower, Abeno Harukas, and Yokohama Landmark Tower in Japan's tallest-building rankings. The Sky Gate Bridge stretches 3.75 kilometers from the base of Rinku Town across the water to the airport island, and the tower stands at the mainland end like a single gatepost. Rinku Town Station, served by both JR Hanwa Line and Nankai Main Line trains, sits at the tower's feet, making it the first major structure travelers see when leaving the airport by rail. The building that was born as a symbol of bubble-era excess has quietly become something more practical: a working hotel, a functioning office complex, and the most reliable visual landmark for anyone trying to spot where the bridge meets the shore.