A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn, and staying in one is among the most peaceful travel experiences Japan offers. The concept dates to the 8th century, when way stations called ryokan (旅館) lined the routes traveled by government officials and pilgrims moving through Japan.

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Over centuries, what began as practical shelter evolved into a form of hospitality built around omotenashi, the Japanese philosophy of selfless, anticipatory care. The staff does not simply wait for you to ask for something. They have already thought about what you need, before you even realized it yourself. The first thing they’ll have you do is remove your shoes. There will be a yukata laid out in your room, a cotton kimono light enough for midsummer and worn with wooden geta sandals. Now you have a new look, and a new sense of belonging among others in this place.

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The Water

The heart of the ryokan experience is the onsen. Japan sits atop one of the most volcanically active zones on earth, and the mineral-rich geothermal waters that surface across the country have been used for healing, community, and daily ritual for longer than recorded history. The tradition is not based on wellness tourism but simply, life, intentionality around water.

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Entering an onsen requires washing first, thoroughly, at shower stations beside the pool. When you finally lower yourself into the water, it will typically be between 40 and 44 degrees Celsius (104 - 111 degress Fahrenheit). Muscles held from the tension of travel release, warmth spreads through every inch, a smile likely will spread across your face, and those of your companions.

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Japanese culture has a phrase for what happens in the bath: hadaka no tsukiai, which translates roughly as "naked communion." The idea is that people shed their social hierarchies along with their clothes. A company executive and a fisherman become the same body in the same water. There is a kind of ease and comfort that can form between strangers under those sahred conditions.

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The Meals

Kaiseki is Japan's formal multi-course cuisine experience, rooted in the tea ceremony tradition and built around seasonal, locally sourced ingredients. A ryokan stay is one of the most special contexts to enjoy it: a kaiseki dinner can run eight courses, each dish sharing something about the specific region, season, even week you are there.

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In the Kinosaki Onsen region of Hyogo Prefecture, whose hot spring tradition stretches back 1,300 years, a kaiseki dinner includes local Tajima beef and Matsuba crab from the Sea of Japan. In Hakone, where mountain springs sit in forested Kanagawa Prefecture, the ingredients lean toward highland vegetables and river fish. The cuisine follows what the land and sea provide. Due to this intentional focus on locality and seasonality, meals at a ryokan reach almost a sacred level, given that you wouldn’t find those dishes anywhere else in the world, at any other time.

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Where to Stay

Nishimuraya Honkan in Kinosaki Onsen has been receiving guests for more than 165 years. The architecture is sukiya-style: dark timber, low eaves, rooms that look onto lush gardens designed to emulate mountains and streams. But the experience here extends well beyond the inn itself. Kinosaki is a town built around its baths, with seven public onsen spread across its streets, each with its own character and mineral profile, each within walking distance of the next.

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Guests receive a pass to all seven and spend their evenings doing what people in this town have done for 1,300 years: moving between baths in yukata and geta, lanterns lit along the Otani River, no agenda or plan, beyond the next soak. One of those seven baths is Kono-yu, the oldest in town, named for a legend from more than 1,300 years ago, when it is said an injured white stork landed here and was seen soaking its wound in the spring water. After several days, it flew away healed. Kono-yu’s healing spring has been welcoming people with aching bodies and tired minds ever since.

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Gora Kadan in Hakone occupies the former summer villa of Japan's imperial family. The gardens date to the Meiji era in the 19th century, and the onsen are fed by the same volcanic springs that have defined the region for centuries. Many rooms come with private soaking tubs made from hinoki cypress, a wood prized for its warmth, grain, and mild scent.

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For an experience even more remote, Tsuru no Yu in Nyuto Onsen Village in Akita Prefecture has been operating as a mountain inn for over 300 years. The outdoor communal baths are milky white from the rich mineral deposits, and set against thatched-roof buildings in a beech forest, where views are especially spectatular with the autumn leaves.

Why It Works

Japan's wellness tourism sector reached USD 62.3 billion in 2025, a number that reflects something clearly: Japanese people have been thinking seriously about rest, ritual, and the relationship between a person and their surroundings for a very long time. The ryokan is not a recent invention, but the real thing, a form of hospitality that has been refined across centuries to work on the body and the mind.

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The stay is designed around a rhythm that gently invites you to follow. It is cultural, the accumulated tradition of omotenashi, of kaiseki, of a bathing tradition that has been providing people with the restorative power of mineral water and shared stillness for over a millennium. And it is also the specific beauty of these places, the cedar and hinoki, the lantern light on moving water, the quiet of a mountain forest. This is the experience Japan has been offering since the 8th century.