Why you should experience Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten in Tokyo, Japan.
Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten is a historic Japanese hotel where Kanda-Surugadai's Meiji intellectual culture, Edo-period innkeeping traditions and more than a century of Hamada family hospitality converge on Ryumeikan's original 1899 site.
Set along Hongo-dori near Kanda-Surugadai and just steps from Ochanomizu Station, the hotel stands where Uhei Hamada established Ryumeikan in 1899 as a branch of Naguraya, the Nihonbashi-Muromachi inn into whose fourth generation he had been born. The original two-storey Japanese building placed every room toward a garden, while Hamada's appetite for innovation produced a Western-style building within the grounds and brought a dedicated cook into the inn to prepare Western cuisine alongside its Japanese traditions. A surviving enju tree deepens that continuity, having been scorched during the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake before producing new shoots and later being deliberately preserved through reconstruction of the property. The result is a hotel where Uhei Hamada, Naguraya, the Great Kanto Earthquake and the surviving enju tree connect Kanda-Surugadai's contemporary hospitality with the physical memory of Ryumeikan's founding site.
What you should know about Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten.
Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten is best known for originating in 1899 when Uhei Hamada founded Ryumeikan in Kanda-Surugadai as a branch of Naguraya, an inn operating in Nihonbashi-Muromachi since the Edo period, before the institution evolved across more than a century into the hotel reopened under its present character on August 1, 2014. The Ryumeikan name is believed to combine “Tatsu,” the name of Hamada's elder sister, with the “Na” of Naguraya, while the success of the original inn produced branches at Gofukubashi and Sarugakucho before Jiro Hamada succeeded the founder in 1918. The Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed the main property and both branches in 1923, prompting Jiro Hamada and founder Uhei Hamada's wife Uta to seek help from a longtime customer, Mr. Honma of Yamagata, who financed reconstruction without interest or a repayment deadline, a debt Ryumeikan repaid before World War II. The rebuilt Honten later survived the war even as the Gofukubashi branch and Naguraya burned during the 1945 air raids, after eight rooms and a hall in Honten's newer building had been used from autumn 1944 as official residences for the Ministry of Greater East Asia. Uhei Hamada, Uta Hamada, Jiro Hamada, Naguraya, Mr. Honma, the 1923 destruction and the Honten's survival of 1945 give Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten an unusually continuous institutional history extending directly across Meiji, Taisho and Showa Tokyo.
Takashi Hamada carried that lineage into Japan's postwar era after becoming Ryumeikan's third-generation leader in 1948, eventually making the consequential 1973 decision to replace the familiar wooden Honten with a high-rise building completed three years later. Akio Hamada succeeded as fourth-generation head in 1995 before the original inn underwent another transformation, closing for renovation on March 31, 2014 and reopening as Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten on August 1 with the new 1899 culinary project created at the same address. RESTAURANT 1899 OCHANOMIZU grew directly from Ryumeikan's ryokan-era kaiseki tradition by incorporating Japanese tea into the cuisine, drawing conceptual significance from Ochanomizu itself, whose name is associated with water used to prepare tea for the Tokugawa shogunate, before the restaurant was renewed under its present name in 2017. MICHELIN Guide Tokyo subsequently included Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten for seven consecutive years beginning with the 2015 edition, connecting Takashi Hamada's postwar rebuilding, Akio Hamada's generational succession, the 2014 reinvention and the 1899 tea concept into the modern continuation of an institution founded on the same Kanda-Surugadai ground in the nineteenth century.
How to fold Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten into your trip.
Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Confucian scholarship, Byzantine architecture and modern Japanese publishing through Kanda-Surugadai and neighboring Jimbocho.
Begin at Yushima Seido, whose origins reach to the Confucian temple established by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi in 1690 before the site became associated with the Shogunate's Shoheizaka Gakumonjo academy, making the hill north of Kanda a major intellectual center of Edo. Continue to Holy Resurrection Cathedral, better known as Nikolai-do, where Russian missionary Nicholas of Japan commissioned architect Mikhail Shchurupov's Byzantine Revival design before Josiah Conder supervised construction of the cathedral completed in 1891, creating one of Meiji Tokyo's defining Christian buildings. Conclude at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, founded in 1952 as Japan's first national museum devoted to modern art before moving beside the Imperial Palace in 1969 into a building designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, placing the development of Japanese modernism within an institution born only a few decades after Ryumeikan's founding. The progression moves from Tokugawa scholarship through Nicholas, Shchurupov and Conder's Meiji religious architecture into Taniguchi's postwar cultural institution, revealing successive intellectual worlds surrounding Hotel Ryumeikan Ochanomizu Honten.
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