I found Tom Selleck's Apartment from Mr. Baseball Yesterday

 

I like the movie Mr. Baseball.  Its not a particularly great movie, but when you've got a very niche hobby (like following Japanese baseball) then you almost by default end up liking any movie that is related to it.

The main thing I like about the film - other than the baseball stuff - is that they filmed it all on location in Japan, and specifically in Nagoya, the city I live in.  A lot of Hollywood movies that purport to be set in contemporary Japan are mostly filmed on sets in the US and this is irritatingly obvious to people who live in Japan because they always make it look like "what people who have never been to Japan think Japan looks like" rather than "what Japan actually looks like".  Mr. Baseball is one of the few where the filmmakers actually went to the trouble of coming to Japan and filming everything (save for a few scenes set in the US) on the ground here and it makes it a much better movie for that reason.  The most obvious scenes where this pays off are the ones showing in game action shot in the actual stadium where the team depicted - our local Chunichi Dragons - played at the time.  But its also evident in the off-the-field scenes where Tom Selleck is doing his "new gaijin having trouble fitting in" routine at various places around town. I love it for that reason. 

I hadn't watched it in a few years but noticed it was on Amazon Prime a few days ago so I put it on.  One scene that I had never paid much attention to really caught my eye while I was doing so.  Its where Tom Selleck is in his apartment talking to his agent on the phone in the US.  Its a pretty boring scene, but at one point he walks in front of the balcony window of his apartment and you get a pretty good look outside.  I hit the pause button and said to myself, "Hey, I know where that is!"

There are three easily identifiable landmarks that you can see in the window, which I've labelled on the below image.  On the far left you can see the Higashiyama Sky Tower, which is a major landmark located in the Zoo.  I was kind of surprised to see that in there since I didn't think it was old enough to have been around 30 years ago when this movie was made, but on looking it up I discovered it was built in 1989, so would have been relatively new back then.  

To the right of Tom Selleck you can see a distinctively shaped building poking up from the wooded hillside, which is the Showa Jukudo, a historic landmark that used to be a school building.  And on the far right you can see a radio tower that to my knowledge has no name but is located in Yagoto. 

As I sat on the sofa I grabbed my iPad and pulled up Google maps to see if I could triangulate the position of Tom based on where one would have to be located in order for those landmarks to be visible like that.  I figured he had to be somewhere in the Kakuozan neighborhood which, coincidentally, is quite close to where I work.  The scene had two further clues that let me narrow the search down even more.  The first was that whatever building he was in had white railings on its balconies.  The second was that there was a somewhat distinctive looking building in the foreground which was across a busy street from it, which you can see on the far right.  This one:

It was pretty easy from there to just use Google Street view to try to locate it, and I did.  So yesterday on my way to work I took a slight detour to visit Tom Selleck's Apartment from Mr. Baseball, which is in a complex called the Tsukimigaoka Mansion. 

The apartment is unfortunately not directly on the street but rather on a small hill located behind a drug store with a multi level parking lot on top of it so I couldn't get any good close up pictures of it, but this is what you can see of it from the street.  

I could confirm this was it by simply looking at the buildings which are visible in the scene.  The one visible on the right of the scene which I mentioned earlier still exists and is across the street and a few doors down:

The old Showa Jukudo is also not far away;

I could get a slightly closer shot  of the building from this angle, which unfortunately shows you the back of the building (the balconies are on the other side).  

Behind the trees in the foreground of the above picture is the driveway that leads to the front entrance.  That is featured in one scene from the movie where Aya Takanashi drops Tom Selleck off.

So there you go - Tom Selleck's apartment from Mr. Baseball is near my work!  I realized after going to all that trouble that someone else has already located the apartment which reminds me of the importance of always Googling stuff like that BEFORE you do a bunch of unnecessary detective work but still, I had fun tracking it down.

Incidentally, Tom Selleck's apartment building is NOT the actual apartment building that the Dragons would use to house their foreign players back then.  I am told that it was actually an apartment complex not far from there called Yagumo Mansion, which looks like this:

I have a couple of friends who used to live in there which are the source of that info.  The Dragons don't put players there anymore, the complex is more than 40 years old and way too shabby for high flying ball players, but back in the 80s its the place they used (if my sources are accurate at least).  Having personally visited the inside of an apartment in it a few times I can say that the one in the movie is a reasonably accurate approximation of the kind of apartment foreign players for the Dragons used to live in.  Not bad by middle class Japanese standards but not the kind of thing a guy sitting on a huge pile of Magnum P.I. money would likely be impressed by.