Delegates meet inside a museum of paintings of the Kurobe Gorge, at the mouth of the gorge itself. Selene stands at Unazuki Onsen, the gateway to the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, and it is no ordinary conference center. At its core is a collection of modern Japanese painting on one subject, the deepest gorge in the country, with large works by Hirayama Ikuo and other leading painters on permanent display.
The specification is serious for a venue this far into the mountains. The main hall takes about 700 with simultaneous interpretation in six languages, enough for a formal international conference or forum. What makes it hard to replace is that everything outside the meeting is at the door: the gorge, the century-old water of Unazuki Onsen, and the open-sided trolley train that runs deep between the cliffs. Private fireworks can be set above the gorge after dark. No city meeting room stitches a serious agenda to a landscape, a body of paintings, hot springs and a railway.
An executive team argues in a hall hung with the gorge, then sinks into water that has run for a century and rides the trolley through the autumn leaves. The reset is not decoration: the agenda produces more because of it.