JAPAN'S BEST-DESIGNED OFFICES
Concept
An office introduced room by room
The company presents its head office at Harumi Triton Square as an inventory. Eleven spaces are named and photographed, and there is no concept statement, no keyword, and no manifesto about ways of working. For a maker of laboratory equipment this is an oddly appropriate way to describe a building: a specification rather than a pitch.
The order is the argument. Entrance and lobby first, then the rooms where visitors are received and presentations are given, then the working floor and the two kinds of meeting space that sit inside it, then the collaboration area — and only at the end the rooms a Japanese company keeps for formality: the seminar room, the executive room, the room for receiving guests.
01 · Entrance and lobby
Arriving, and waiting
The entrance and the lobby are listed as two separate spaces rather than one, which is the usual arrangement in a Japanese office building: the entrance belongs to the company’s floor, and the lobby is where a visitor is left while reception telephones through.
02 · The presentation room
A room for showing equipment
A dedicated presentation room comes third in the sequence, before any of the meeting rooms. For a company that sells instruments to laboratories, the room where the instruments are shown outranks the room where terms are agreed.
03 · The meeting rooms
Three of them, listed together
Three meeting rooms are shown as one space in the list — 会議室, in the plural sense the Japanese word allows — which suggests they are treated as interchangeable rather than as rooms with characters of their own.
04 · The working corner
Where the desks are
The working floor is called a 執務コーナー — a working corner — a modest word for the largest part of any office. Japanese floor plans routinely use コーナー for a zone rather than a corner, which is why a working corner can occupy a whole side of a building.
05 · Meeting corner, collaboration area
Two ways of talking without booking
Two more spaces sit inside the working floor: a meeting corner and a collaboration area. Both exist so that a conversation can start without a room being reserved, and listing them separately implies a difference in scale — a corner for two or three people, an area for a group.
06 · The Wa room, and the formal rooms
The end of the sequence
The list closes with four rooms: 倭室, the seminar room, the executive room and the reception room. The seminar room is for teaching customers; the executive room and the reception room are the two rooms a Japanese company keeps for rank and for guests, and they are still, in 2026, almost always the last rooms shown on a company’s own office page.
