Name: 24 Hours In A Luxury Ryokan | Where To Stay in Central Tokyo 🗼🇯🇵
Uploaded: 2025-09-25T18:13:40.000Z
Duration: 9 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's Mikayla and today I'm in Tokyo at Shinagawa Station.

Adverbs of degree

So when you visit Tokyo, there are so many different areas that you could possibly stay.

For me, I always prefer to stay in Shinagawa and that is because it's extremely convenient to access from both airports, Haneda or Narita.

And right outside of Shinagawa Station is the Prince Hotel Group.

It's like this massive complex of different hotels run by the same group and they vary based on the theme.

So there's a business Prince Hotel, there's like a family Prince Hotel, and then there's even a Japanese garden ryokan style Prince Hotel.

And that's where we're going to go today.

As we're heading up the hill here, you can see we're leaving the cityscape behind us and entering a really peaceful neighborhood surrounded by green trees, which is really nice.

It's only minutes away from the station, but already it's so much quieter here.

So today we are checking into Takanawa Hana Koro, the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa.

The Prince Hotel's luxury ryokan style accommodation in the heart of Tokyo is just minutes from Shinagawa Station.

The check-in process starts in the lounge where you are made comfortable with green tea and a Japanese style suite while you're briefed on the details of your stay.

During the afternoon, you can help yourself to any of the suites or refreshments in this lounge and they rotate the menus daily.

So tomorrow we'll have something different.

The room I stayed in was big enough for an entire family of four, even bigger than many apartments in Tokyo, I think.

With ample storage space, warm wooden interiors, soft tatami floors, and large windows offering natural sunlight, this is a really cozy place to rest and restore your energy.

You almost don't want to leave the room at all.

In Japan, space is a luxury and not only is the bedroom quite large, but with the bath and toilet separated and located down the hall, even if you're traveling with family and staying in this room, this layout ensures that everybody has their space and privacy.

If you've just arrived in Japan, you're probably feeling really crusty, but this bath has natural lighting and a big window facing the garden so you can get adjusted to the different time zones easily.

The high quality amenities and the bath bombs are a nice touch as well.

After a brief rest, I decided to check out another lounge in the hotel.

The first floor lounge is also accessible to those staying at Hanakoro and with large windows facing a gorgeous Japanese garden, the view here rivals some of the more upscale cafes in the city.

Here, you can enjoy soft drinks, coffee, tea, and even beer on tap as well.

If you've just arrived in Japan and you're jet-lagged or too tired to enter the city, this is a cool place to chill and relax without staying in your room all day.

It really is so rare and such a treat to have a huge green garden like this in the middle of the city, so close to Shinagawa Station.

What's really cool about the Prince Hotel Group is that it's a massive plot of land.

There are several buildings, different hotels in the area, and if you are staying at Hanakoro, you actually have access to two other lounges in two of the other neighboring hotels that are connected to this park.

If you're coming to Tokyo and you're only staying for like a day, 48 hours, and you want to have a Japanese experience without getting too knee-deep into Japan, this is a great choice.

The name Hanakoro means flower road in Japanese, and true to its word, the building is surrounded by seasonal beauty.

And if you can't see it during daylight hours, then you can always come out to the park at night for an entirely different but equally beautiful experience.

For dinner, I had a reservation for tempura, a multi-course meal fried fresh before my very eyes.

I had never considered tempura to be a course meal food before, but what I experienced here was of much higher quality than I've ever had.

A professional tempura chef, Ando-san, knows the exact amount of time to fry each ingredient for the optimal taste and texture, and he isn't shy to recommend his favorite seasonings to guests.        The final dish was a kakiage-style tempura rice bowl, and with my permission, he topped it with a deep-fried tempura egg.

I swear, this was the best tempura I've ever had in my life.

In the evening, it was back to the lounge.

After dinner, it becomes a spot for late-night cocktails and sake tasting, with free-flow drinks and an otsumami Japanese-style snack platter to enjoy with your beverage of choice.

There was no way I could finish all of this after dinner, but luckily I had some friends helping me out today, and we were happy to cheers to an amazing day so far.

After a late night in the lounge, I woke up to have breakfast served to me in the comfort of my own room.

This Japanese traditional breakfast is both visually appealing and nutritionally balanced.

Japanese food is really diverse, there's lots of different textures and flavors and ingredients, and many of them you may be unfamiliar with if you haven't been to Japan before.

So this is a great way to get just like little nibbles of everything.

You don't have to like everything, you don't have to finish everything, but the good thing is, if you don't like something, there's usually only just one bite of it, and if you leave it, you're not leaving like an entire meal.

It's not like you've ordered the wrong thing, which I think is a type of anxiety that people can get when visiting a new country.

Like, what if I order the wrong thing and I don't like it and I can't finish it?

There's none of that anxiety, which is really cool.

Next, it was time to dive into some uniquely Japanese experiences at the hotel.

First up, visiting the koi carp in the garden pond.

A symbol of strength and perseverance in Japanese folklore, these majestic fish are colorful and hardy and really, really fun to witness up close.

Japanese summers are quite hot and humid, and the weather can turn quickly, but luckily a rainstorm that starts up out of nowhere usually doesn't last too long.

Then, at 11am, it was time for a light snack, and I stopped by the lounge one last time.

This experience and dessert is included in your stay at Hanakoro, so I figured it would be a waste not to give it a try while I'm here.

I was taught to use a stone mortar to grind tea leaves into a fine dust.

Ground fine matcha powder was then used to flavor my anmitsu, a Japanese-style light dessert with jelly, bean paste, fruits, and brown sugar syrup.

I've never had anmitsu with freshly ground matcha powder on top, and it adds this very subtle aromatic flavor to the dish.

I had enough time for one more activity, and at noon I decided to take an ikebana lesson.

Ikebana is the art of flower arranging, and guests who participate in this class can actually display their own arrangements in their hotel rooms during their stay.

Aligning the flowers and stems in a visually striking way is definitely an acquired talent, but thankfully I had a great teacher helping me design my very own piece of floral art, and I got a lot of great pointers in the process.

Sadly, I didn't think I could take mine home with me on the plane, so I decided to donate it to the hotel.

So I had a really great stay here, but it's time to leave.

Hopefully for those of you who are wondering what to do if you come to Japan for a short period of time and you don't exactly have a lot of time to do sightseeing, but you want to get all the Japanese cultural stuff packed into a very, very rich experience, you consider staying here.

I had a great time, and hopefully when you come, you do too!

Alright guys, thank you so much for watching, and I will talk to you hopefully again soon!