The company I work for is finally moving early next year. We’re gonna have a super cool new office on the top floors of one of the new high rises popping up in central Tokyo. I hope I can get a seat with a view of Mt. Fuji. That would be my dream come true, for sure! Anyway, I was one of a dozen people picked to visit some swanky furniture shops to look at chairs and furniture. It was really good to get out of the office despite it raining all afternoon. We visited several shops at the Tokyo Design Centre including Herman Miller. They gave us a tour of their comfy office which doubles as their showroom. The Aeron Chair (above left) is one of the most popular chairs amongst finance people. I’ve visited a few trading floors and the first thing I always notice are the Aeron chairs everyone has. We tested out dozens of candidates for our office chair and all were very nice. The chair I use at the office right now is so crap even a bar stool would be better.

On the chair tour we visited the Wilkhahn shop in the Axis Building in Roppongi where I saw this fine leather chair (left) that costs over $4000. Wait, where have we seen it before? Can you guess? Yes, it’s from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Yoda is sitting on this chair at the end when they’re discussing what to do with Luke and Leia. Very cool. But even more space-age is the Cruise & Atlas seen at the Okamura showroom. I’ve seen pictures of this workstation before and thought it would be extremely uncomfortable sitting in a recline position. But I tried it out and it’s incredibly comfortable and natural feeling that now I want to get one for myself. Oh, there are just too many things I want now.