The Best Hotels in Izu

A Noh stage floats on the central pond, and performances are staged there regularly, which tells you everything about the register of this ryokan. The 12 tatami rooms are deliberately spare, all facing the courtyard rather than the forest so you don't miss it. The baths range from semi-public to private to a hot spring pool edged by rocks. The cuisine is traditional and none the worse for it. Asaba holds three Michelin Keys.

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 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 ryokan-meets-Italian-auberge is a concept that should not work and yet here we are. This small, centuries-old family estate in Nishi Izu has been converted into a handful of spacious suites and a villa, each nearly self-contained, with en suite spring-fed baths. An Italian restaurant and a French pastry bakery with house-made gelato round things out, because apparently halfway measures weren't considered.

Every one of the 16 rooms looks straight out to sea, and each has its own private spring-fed onsen bath, which is the kind of sentence that makes people start searching flights. This stylish coastal hotel in Atagawa is a converted ryokan, and the old public bathhouse is now a suite with a private bath the size of a small apartment. The restaurant leans into the flavors of the Izu peninsula, salt air and all.