The Best Places in Japan

A French counter restaurant where the counter seats exactly six, which is also what the name means, so the math is settled before you sit down. The chef cooks close enough to touch, ferments with koji and miso, and builds dishes around edible wild plants his mother forages in Nagano. His father makes the wooden trays by hand. Dessert belongs to the proprietress. It is an intimate, family-threaded place that feels less like a restaurant than someone's very skilled living room.

The pizza here crosses Naples with Japan without making a fuss about it, which is harder than it sounds. This is a Neapolitan-style pizzeria inside Azabudai Hills, run by a Neapolitan who has been in Tokyo long enough to know exactly where local ingredients fit into a classic dough. The menu is short and deliberate, the fermentation long, and the wine cellar personal. It holds the top spot on 50 Top Pizza Asia-Pacific and sits at number thirteen on the World list.

The public onsen runs on sulfate-heavy water for exfoliation, while the in-room baths draw from a separate chloride-rich spring for moisture, and yes, the distinction matters. FUFU is a modern ryokan brand, and this Hakone outpost brings that sensibility to the mountains less than an hour from Tokyo: 39 rooms, kaiseki dinners, and mountain views arranged with a quietude that feels deliberate rather than accidental. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A hotel on the grounds of an active racing circuit, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing both Mount Fuji and the track. Rooms are minimalist and considered, with soaking tubs and balconies, and the property includes an onsen-style spa, a motorsport museum, and Italian and Japanese restaurants. The excursions menu covers Fuji and the speedway, which is a sentence that makes perfect sense here. It holds a Michelin Key.

Every room at this Hakone ryokan comes with its own private onsen bath, and there's still a full communal bath complex if you want company, or just more hot water. It holds a Michelin Key. The tatami and Western-style rooms run quieter and plusher than the category usually manages, all muted tones and unhurried design. Seasonal kaiseki and mountain views round out the kind of stay that makes the bullet train home feel like a personal affront.

Eight rooms, all with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over Noto Island's water, which is the kind of ratio that keeps things quiet. This boutique hotel mixes tatami mats and blonde wood platform beds with dark-tiled soaking tubs pointed at the ocean, a combination that sounds like it was designed by someone who couldn't pick between Kyoto and Copenhagen. Some rooms have private terraces and saunas; the spa adds fragrant outdoor baths and a wood-burning sauna. It holds a Michelin Key.

Kouri Island sits two bridges off the Okinawa coast and is, by local tradition, called Love Island on account of some heart-shaped rocks. One Suite THE GRAND is a 21-room luxury boutique resort there, and the island being a quiet leisure spot rather than a busy one is the actual selling point. Every room faces the sea, many terraces come with an outdoor jacuzzi, and the Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A French auberge in Hakone is an odd choice until you're soaking in the private onsen that comes with every room. This small resort takes twenty Western-style rooms and pairs them with European cooking built from local ingredients, some looking out over the caldera, others into dense cedar green. It holds a Michelin Key, and the whole thing feels like someone genuinely couldn't choose between Burgundy and the hot springs, then refused to.

Thirteen rooms spread across restored century-old machiya in Otsu's old shopping arcades, with Finn Juhl and Hans Wegner furniture placed like they belong there. This small hotel sits nine minutes by train from Kyoto in a former post town on the Tokaido route, which sounds like a history lesson until you're staring at Lake Biwa with no tour groups in sight. A portion of each stay goes to local shops through the hotel's own funding scheme, so you're sleeping in good conscience.

The rooftop bar on the 14th floor looks out over a city that still takes its geisha and samurai history seriously, which makes the boutique-chic interiors and tapas-inspired all-day grill feel like an interesting argument. This contemporary hotel plants the Hyatt Centric brand squarely in one of Japan's most tradition-minded cities, and the tension is mostly the point. The Michelin Guide lists it among its selected hotels.

The reception sits on the top floor so that every guest's first view is Sagami Bay through floor-to-ceiling glass, which tells you exactly what this ryokan-style hotel is about. Every room has a private terrace with an onsen bath facing the water, communal open-air soaking pools sit one floor below, and an indoor circuit of baths and saunas handles the rest. A sushi bar and a kaiseki seafood restaurant round things out. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A modern ryokan from the well-regarded Fufu brand, set in eastern Nagano with Mount Asama visible on the horizon. Living plants fill every room and corridor, so the surrounding greenery doesn't stay outside. The hot springs run with calcium-sodium sulfate water, and the restaurant leans into a Japanese take on French cooking using whatever the season is handing the kitchen. It holds a Michelin Key.

A Michelin Key-holding luxury ryokan-style resort sitting beside Kumoba Pond in the Karuizawa highlands, where the forest does most of the therapeutic work before you've even checked in. Rooms run warm via underfloor heating and wood stoves, and the hot spring baths handle the rest. The design is sleek and contemporary, the restaurant leans into regional Shinshu cuisine, and the whole operation is quiet enough that you'll forget the train exists.

A three-room inn and Italian restaurant tucked into Yamagata's Okitama Valley, where the temperature swings are wide enough that the local vegetables and Yonezawa beef taste noticeably different for it. The chef makes his pasta by hand, dry-ages the beef, and composes the dining room with the same deliberateness as the plates. One suite has a Finnish sauna. Both face the fields. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

A ryokan tucked into the volcanic slopes of Mount Unzen, where the hot springs are the property's own and the architecture, all Sukiya-zukuri joinery and paper screens, makes the forest outside feel designed. Fourteen freestanding villas have tatami floors and lacquerware, and the gardens are old enough to have a mood. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. Unplugging here is less a lifestyle choice than an inevitability.

Setsu Niseko sits slope-side in Niseko, where the powder snow has made Japan's ski scene impossible to ignore. This 190-room hotel runs from studios to four-bedroom suites, all finished in a mix of contemporary architecture and traditional Japanese craft that feels surprisingly polished for somewhere you arrive in ski boots. An onsen, spa, and five restaurants round out the stay, and it holds a Michelin Key.

Old wooden farmhouses were dismantled, carried to a quiet valley outside Niseko, and rebuilt without a single nail, the hand-carved beams locked together the way they were centuries ago. The five cottages at this design hotel each carry a Japanese elemental name and house pieces from the owner's personal art collection, private onsen baths, and curated libraries. A wood-lined spa, mountain-view restaurant, and Hokkaido wines round it out. One Michelin Key.

A centuries-old snow-country house hiding Arne Jacobsen Swan chairs and Tendo Mokko furniture inside is a particular kind of confidence. This small inn, a Michelin Key holder, divides its rooms across the main house and an old storehouse, each fitted with a private open-air bath fed by local hot springs and tended by dedicated attendants. The Nordic-meets-Japanese minimalism is as calm as the setting, which is saying something.

A ryokan on the Uji River that sits where a 16th-century castle once stood, which the staff mention casually, as if everyone sleeps on old fortifications. Rooms blend Japanese tradition with European modernist furniture in a way that should be odd and somehow isn't. The onsen and spa are the reason to linger, and the Fushimi neighborhood outside offers cultural sites and a sake industry that takes itself very seriously, justifiably so.

A prix fixe restaurant in Nishi-ku where the menu has no fixed dishes because the chef keeps rewriting it, drawing on Italian and French training, pastry work, and a deep attachment to Osaka. The first half of the meal is essentially a love letter to the city; the second half ends with seasonal mixed rice, served in a bowl you hold in your hands. Handmade ceramics carry the food. Genre-less is the point, not the problem.

The chef mills his own buckwheat, some of it grown in his own garden, to coax out an aroma that pre-ground flour can't touch. This quiet soba shop in Jingumae serves coarse-ground seiro with a wild, earthy depth that makes the usual lunch-counter bowl feel like a different food entirely. Evenings shift to a prix fixe format with small courses built around buckwheat in forms well beyond the noodle.

Beppu's hot spring waters feed directly into the resort's onsen baths, which is either the best argument for booking a room with a private one or a very good reason to use the communal bath and let someone else clean it. This is a full-service luxury resort, serious about it in the way Japanese hospitality tends to be, with spacious rooms, terraces overlooking the landscape, a HARNN Heritage Spa, and a French restaurant anchoring the dining. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Ski-in, ski-out at the foot of Mount Annupuri, this Ritz-Carlton Reserve holds a Michelin Key and takes the full-service mountain resort concept about as seriously as anyone does. Contemporary Japanese design runs through the rooms, the two Japanese restaurants pull their own weight, and the Sothys spa exists for days when the powder can wait. Niseko summers have been quietly stealing attention from the winters lately, which gives the place a longer argument for itself.

Stacked like a child's building blocks against the Hokkaido slope, this ski-in/ski-out resort holds a Michelin Key and takes the alpine-chic brief seriously: blonde wood, geometric light fixtures, full kitchens, and in-room laundry that quietly suggest you could stay much longer than planned. Two genuine onsen seal the argument, and the infinity version frames Mt. Yotei in a way that makes other hotel views feel apologetic.

Ski-in/ski-out access is standard for Niseko resorts, but Sansui pairs it with a lavish onsen complex, a spa, and soaking tubs positioned to face the volcanic silhouette of Mount Yōtei. This boutique luxury hotel keeps things sleek and contemporary, and the penthouse runs to two private onsen baths in case one feels austere. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. An outpost of the acclaimed Sapporo sushi counter Miyakawa is on site.

Twelve suites on Hiai Island inside Unzen Amakusa National Park, each with a private open-air onsen bath and views straight out over the Amakusa seascape. This minimalist boutique hotel sits where the mild climate and the water do most of the decorating. Guests eat together in the restaurant, where the kitchen draws on the islands and the surrounding sea. The Michelin Guide has awarded it one Key.

The timber ceilings at this remote ryokan outside Takayama have uncut tree trunks running straight through them, and the walls in places are pressed earth, yet the comforts are thoroughly civilized. Minka-style guesthouses, a communal hearth that has stained the old beams to a deep black, cove-like baths, forest quiet. It holds a Michelin Key. Getting here is half the mood: four and a half hours from Tokyo, then a shuttle up into the mountains.

Zen monks used to retreat here, and the property hasn't entirely let go of that energy. Yufuin Tamanoyu is a ryokan-style resort in the wooded hills above one of Oita's most visited hot-spring villages, with low-lying villas connected by footpaths and rooms that come with tatami, a sitting area, and a private wooden tub fed by the onsen. The tea room and bar look straight into the forest. It holds a Michelin Key.

Ski-in, ski-out access puts The Vale Niseko about as close to the Hirafu slopes as you can sleep without pitching a tent on them. This upscale 49-room hotel runs a dining venue popular enough to pull people out of their après-ski fog, and when the snow melts, a heated outdoor pool keeps the mood firmly resort-minded. The powder that draws people to Hokkaido is the draw; the hotel is why they book a longer stay.

A private hot tub fed by natural spring water sits on every balcony, which tells you something about the philosophy here. This Michelin Key-holding inn on the Izu Peninsula blends ryokan tradition with international boutique sensibility, the furniture by Osaka designers Graf, the walls of glass framing uninterrupted forest. The 32-seat French restaurant seats everyone facing outward, like a cinema where the film never changes. Two hours from Tokyo, no children under 12.

The old sake brewery still ferments on the ground floor, now producing for the hotel's own bar. BYAKU Narai is a boutique hotel assembled from abandoned Edo-period structures along the Nakasendo Road, including a guesthouse and a temple fragment, each room restored to show its bones. Rooms range from cozy historic cells to sprawling two-floor suites. A Japanese restaurant and public baths round things out, and the Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

The shared baths here look less like a hotel amenity and more like something carved by a stream over centuries, all natural rock, steam, and old timber. Ochiairo is a classic ryokan on the Izu Peninsula, about two hours from Tokyo, where kaiseki dinners arrive in your tatami room and the wooden structure seems to grow straight out of the mountain valley around it. It holds a Michelin Key.

A Nagano valley ryokan whose name translates as "wind through the trees in the mountains," which tells you exactly the kind of stay they're selling. The main draw is a series of baths, indoor, outdoor, communal, and private, that the region has been perfecting for centuries. Rooms are traditional Japanese style: tatami, translucent screens, low furnishings, arabesque archways, and dark wood throughout. A lounge bar opens onto a garden for the intervals between soaks. It holds a Michelin Key.

Eight rooms tucked into a destination restaurant on Ago Bay, a famously winding inlet that earns every photograph taken of it. The concept is "western ryokan," which here means French-inflected hospitality dressed in Western interiors but delivered with the quiet attentiveness Japan does better than anyone. Some rooms have private spring-fed baths, and the spa runs a thalasso pool filled with actual seawater from the bay outside. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Six seats at a minimalist wooden counter is the whole room at Chiune, a Chinese fine dining restaurant inside Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioicho. The chef is the son of a celebrated figure in the city's Chinese dining scene, and the apple has not fallen far, with the menu leaning into premium ingredients and showmanship, including a Shaoxing wine gelato finished tableside. Small by design, quiet by default.

Getting a table here requires knowing the chef, then buying one of her fashion-inspired cakes, which are themselves hard to obtain and not cheap. Once inside, Été is essentially a private dining room, one table per night, where the chef serves intricate French cuisine herself. It holds a spot on The 50 Discovery list, and the whole setup feels less like booking a restaurant and more like being admitted to something.

Getting a table here requires an introduction, which is either a charming throwback or a gentle hint about the clientele, depending on your outlook. This intimate Ginza steakhouse, set across two floors above the street, is built around Tajima and Kobe beef, including cuts from champion-awarded cattle. The chef's Western-influenced approach runs from seared beef assortments through oxtail soup to precisely grilled sirloin or fillet.

A tiny kaiseki counter in Shinjuku where the set menu reads like a seasonal dispatch from across Japan, spiny lobster to black wagyu, every ingredient traced back to its source. The chef behind it built his reputation in Kobe before relocating to Tokyo, and the room stayed small by design. Getting a seat here requires the kind of advance planning people usually reserve for international travel.

The chef here has been breaking down beef since childhood, son of a butcher and grandson of a cattle dealer, which goes some way to explaining why the Wagyu at this refined Ginza steakhouse hits differently. A long tasting menu works through ten-plus courses built around prime cuts, with aged Kobe beef as the centrepiece. The room is polished and the prices will remind you that you're in Ginza.

Four seats, two tables, and a waitlist measured in years: Pellegrino is an Italian dining room in miniature, tucked into Ebisu, where chef Takahashi Hayato cooks the specialities of Parma with the intimacy of a family kitchen in Emilia Romagna. Meals arrive in two halves, guided by what the chef calls "everything supreme," which turns out to be less a motto than a floor plan. A 50 Discovery from the World's 50 Best.

There are no posted hours, no website, and no reservation link because Sugalabo doesn't want strangers walking in. The chef trained under Joël Robuchon for sixteen years, and his Japanese-French counter dining is available strictly by introduction from an existing regular, a custom called ichigensan okotowari. Find a friend who already has a seat, and then you can worry about the food.

Eight seats, a wooden counter, and a chef who decides the menu each morning based on whatever the market gave up. This is a small omakase sushi bar in Ginza, the kind of place where the room disappears and the fish is the whole conversation. Lunch draws a lengthy queue for a compact, modestly priced sushi set that Tokyo talks about; evenings shift into something more elaborate. A Discovery on The 50 list.

A sign no bigger than a bathroom tile marks the wooden door, which makes a 13-seat omakase counter behind it feel like something you earned just by finding the place. The earthy interior is deliberately spare, a single monochrome painting on the wall so that nothing competes with the chefs working over enormous blocks of wood in front of you. Sushi Mitani holds a spot on the World's 50 Best Discovery list.

A thick slice of kobe beef chateaubriand, deep-fried and folded into fluffy milk bread with tonkotsu sauce, cut into four neat quarters: that is essentially the whole menu. Wagyumafia is a standing-room katsu sandwich spot in Nakameguro, with a few high stools and no pretense of a broader vision. In a city where culinary traditions are treated like sacred texts, building a restaurant around a single sandwich takes a certain nerve.

Shadowy basement banquettes, sake in hand, and wagyu on the grill: Yoroniku is a yakiniku restaurant in Minami-aoyama that high-profile Tokyoites have made something of a private secret. DJ-turned-chef Vanne Kuwahara runs the room, and set menus work through wagyu in careful sequence, from brined tongue with lemon to rich sirloin you cook yourself at the table. A Discovery on The 50 list.

Eight seats, charcoal fire, and no set menu: what you eat at this intimate Higashiyama restaurant depends on the season, the market that morning, and what you tell the chef you want. The name translates loosely as a retreat where happiness rains down, which is either deeply poetic or exactly what happens when autumn unagi comes off the grill. The 50 Discovery program has taken notice.

The long main corridor bends in a gentle arc, one side all rooms, the other a continuous double-height window of forest, like an aquarium tunnel where the sharks have been traded for greenery. This contemporary ryokan in Minakami's onsen country holds a Michelin Key, and the baths, open on multiple sides to surrounding trees and mountain air, are the real argument for coming. Rooms run tatami, Western, or a blend of both.

Every suite at this sixteen-room ryokan comes with its own private open-air hot spring bath, which tells you what the priorities are here. Oyado The Earth sits inside Ise Shima national park on the Pacific coast, wrapped in old-growth forest with Toba Bay in the middle distance. Common areas are tatami-traditional; bedrooms go hotel-style for comfort. Multi-course kaiseki rounds out the evenings. It holds a Michelin Key, and guests must be at least 14.

A 400-year-old Japanese beech tree grows inside the club lounge, which tells you something about the ambition here. This small luxury ski resort in Iwate, just 38 rooms, holds a Michelin Key, and every unit sits at Club InterContinental level with floor-to-ceiling views of slopes and forest. The top-floor onsen has cypress baths facing the treetops, the restaurant runs Japanese-French, and the bar specializes in Japanese whisky.

Floor-to-ceiling windows face the mountains of Yamaguchi Prefecture, which is a long way from anywhere by design. Bettei Otozure is a ryokan reconsidered for people who appreciate both tatami floors and mid-century furniture, and the combination sits more comfortably than it has any right to. Suites have private outdoor baths; communal ones are available too. It holds a Michelin Key. No guests under 13, which keeps the mood exactly where it wants to be.