The Best Hotels in Onomichi

Cypress soaking tubs, tatami rooms, sliding screens opening to private stone gardens: this ryokan on the remote island of Ikuchijima in Japan's Inland Sea was built inside a merchant estate that Adrian Zecha, the Aman founder, chose to restore rather than replace. The restaurant serves local and seasonal ingredients with French technique, meals are communal by default, and a traditional bathhouse across the street is shared with locals. It holds a Michelin Key.

A ryokan that happens to be a ship. Guntu is a floating hotel that sails three routes across the Seto Inland Sea, and its 17 wood-paneled cabins were designed by an architect whose usual brief is Japanese private homes, which explains why they feel so lived-in and calm. Three restaurants cover sushi, grilled fish, and yoshoku, a tea master runs the lounge, and hinoki cypress bathtubs and saunas handle the rest.

A converted salt warehouse on a citrus island along the Shimanami Kaido cycling route, SOIL Setoda folds a small hotel into a working community hub, sharing the site with a café and roaster, a waterfront restaurant, and a bento shop. Rooms face either the channel or the old shopping arcade, so you're less a tourist looking in than a temporary resident. Workshops and island producers do the rest; the pace here is Setoda's, not a hotel's.

You can ride your bike straight through the front door, which tells you everything about this hotel's commitments. Housed in the Onomichi U2 warehouse complex on Hiroshima's waterfront, Hotel Cycle keeps the double-height ceilings and industrial bones while warming the rooms up enough to actually sleep in. The hooks for hanging your bike are standard issue. Outside, the Shimanami Kaido path connects Honshu and Shikoku across six islands, which is the whole point.