The Fujiya Hotel

Friday, Tokyo Station

One train, one bus, ninety minutes

From Tokyo Station, the Fujiya Hotel is about ninety minutes away: one train, one bus, two minutes on foot. It has taken guests in Miyanoshita, a hot-spring village in the hills of Hakone, since 1878, and it is a Friday-evening trip.

Take the Kodama Shinkansen from Tokyo Station to Odawara, about 35 minutes. Walk five minutes to the East Exit bus terminal, stop 3 or 4, and ride about half an hour up the mountain to the stop called Hotel-mae, “in front of the hotel.” The door is two minutes away.

Leave Tokyo Station by five and you will make the dining room’s last orders at 7:30. From Shinjuku, the Romancecar to Hakone-Yumoto, then the Hakone Tozan Railway to Miyanoshita, takes about 140 minutes. By car it is about 90 minutes without traffic. On a Friday, there is traffic.

Sennosuke Yamaguchi opened a hotel here in 1878, the first true resort hotel in Japan by the house’s own account. From 2018 to 2020 the old buildings were restored and braced against earthquakes, and five of them are registered cultural properties.

Friday, on arrival

Ask for a flower, not a number

Check-in starts at 3 p.m. The Main, built in 1891, is the face of the house, louvered windows under a carved gable. Then cross to the Flower Palace, the wing of 1936 with stacked green gables and red balconies. Its rooms have no numbers. Each is named for a flower, and the flower is on the door, in the carpet and on the key.

Ask for a Heritage Room, one of the two that recreate the year it was built: Rose, on the corner of the first floor, or Cherry Blossom, on the second. Each runs 743 to 797 square feet, under ceilings of up to almost twelve feet. Chrysanthemum, another corner room, looks across at the dining hall and The Main. Helen Keller slept in this wing in 1937.

Or take the room Charlie Chaplin stayed in, in 1932, in The Main. The hotel gives it to one booking a day, with a Chaplin-themed afternoon tea brought to the room and check-in from 2 p.m.: 527 square feet, all in white, under ceilings of 11.8 feet. On Friday, November 13, 2026, it was ¥197,000 for two, tax and service included, and no longer on sale. The plan runs to August 31, 2027, for adults only.

The Flower Palace penthouse takes the fourth floor, 1,216 square feet, reached by stairs from the third. If stairs are a problem, skip Comfy Lodge and Restful Cottage, the wooden pair of 1906: they have no elevators. The Forest Wing, from 1960, is the modern building.

Every one of the 120 rooms has a bath fed by the village’s hot spring.

In the Flower Palace, rooms have no numbers. They have flowers, down to the key.

Friday, 7 p.m.

Dinner under 636 painted plants

The Main Dining Room has served since 1930. Look up: the coffered ceiling, twenty feet high, holds 636 paintings of Japanese alpine plants. Dinner is French, from 5:30 to 8:30, last orders at 7:30. Reserve it with the room.

Afterward, Bar Victoria pours until ten: leather club chairs, a grand piano, the bar lit at the far end of the room.

Saturday, 5 a.m.

Hot water before breakfast

The spa is on the sixth floor of the Forest Wing, at the top of the building, facing the Hakone caldera. It opens at 5 a.m. and closes at 11, then again from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. One rule to know: the hotel asks guests with tattoos not to use the public baths or the pool.

Then swim. The indoor pool under the Flower Palace is, the hotel says, the first indoor hotel pool in Japan, and it is filled with hot-spring water at about 86°F. It opens at 5 a.m. too. Breakfast is in the Main Dining Room, from 7:30 to 10.

Saturday, late morning

Mount Fuji, forty minutes uphill

The Sengen trail starts behind the hotel. About forty minutes up, a lookout called the Fuji View Stand faces Mount Fuji. Go on a clear morning. The whole loop, past Sengen Shrine and down to Chisuji Waterfall, takes two and a half hours and climbs 1,224 feet.

If it rains, go to the Hakone Open-Air Museum instead, a few minutes by taxi or at Chokoku-no-Mori station on the mountain railway: 17 acres of sculpture, 26 works by Henry Moore, more than 300 by Picasso. It opens at 9, every day of the year. Admission is ¥2,000, or ¥1,800 online.

Saturday, noon

Lunch in the imperial villa

Kikka-so was built in 1895 as the imperial family’s villa in Miyanoshita. It serves Japanese food at lunch, from noon to 3, over a pond garden crossed by a red bridge. Book by 4 p.m. the day before: the house is open to people who are not staying, too. It also has private baths of hinoki cypress and offers kimono dressing; ask the concierge. On weekends the Main Dining Room serves lunch as well, on the same booking rule.

Spend the afternoon below the Flower Palace. The hotel museum there is free, and its audio guide, told in the voices of the founder, Sennosuke Yamaguchi, and of Shozo Yamaguchi, who designed the Flower Palace, takes 45 minutes and costs ¥500. Then apple pie in the Lounge, open until 5:30. For dinner, try Cascade, a banquet hall of 1920 with stained-glass walls, where the kitchen cooks the hotel’s old Western recipes.

Sunday, before 11 a.m.

The garden, then the bakery

Check-out is at 11. Walk the garden first: four acres, fifteen to twenty minutes around. The maples turn from mid- to late November in most years; the cherries flower in early to mid-April.

The last stop is Picot, the hotel’s bakery on Route 1, open from 8: curry bread for the train, raisin bread, an apple pie to carry home. If there is time, sit down: until 2 p.m. Picot serves a brunch set for ¥2,500. Hotel-mae, where the bus left you on Friday, is two minutes from the door.