Centara Hotels & Resorts, a leading hotel operator in Thailand, together with Taisei Corporation and Kanden Realty & Development have broken ground on construction of the 34-storey Centara Grand Hotel Osaka.
The ceremony took place recently at the Safety Prayer Festival at Namba Shrine near the new hotel site.
According to Japanese tradition, before any new construction can begin, a jichinsai ceremony must be held to purify the ground and seek the blessing of the local gods. Shinto priests led the ceremony, and sake was used as one the main elements, sprinkled across the ground where the new construction is planned. Special sake bottles for each of the three partner companies were produced for the ceremony.
Centara Grand Hotel Osaka is Centara's first property in Japan and is scheduled to open in mid-2023.
The newly built hotel is an upscale property with 515 keys in Osaka's Namba district, a centre for leisure tourism within the city and the wider Kansai region.