Visiting Japan for the first time I found that it wasn’t necessarily a country of skyscrapers. There were no vast ‘downtowns’ even in such big cities as Tokyo and Osaka, and in smaller cities like Hiroshima or Matsumoto there weren't any tall buildings at all!
But, of course, a modern megalopolis can’t exist without multi-storied buildings and communication towers. And these buildings, aside from being hotels, offices, and centres of retail, also have observation facilities. A few of them, such as the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building and the AER Building in Sendai have free observation decks. In Hamamatsu you can observe the city and its surroundings, including Mt. Fuji on a clear day, for 500 JPY though other observation decks can be quite expensive - from 1000 JPY to 4000 JPY for the Tokyo Skytree Combo ticket.
One thing you will notice from these observation decks (or even from the ferris wheel of Yokohama's Cosmo World Amusement Park) is that most of the buildings in any area are not actually that tall with only a few towers in the city...
