Hotel Ryumeikan Tokyo

Tokyo Station is the Shinkansen hub for everything heading west and north: the Tokaido line to Kyoto, Osaka and Hiroshima, the Tohoku line to Sendai and Aomori, the Hokuriku line to Kanazawa. It is also a Narita Express terminus and the origin of a large share of the airport buses.

That means an arrival from Narita ends a three-minute walk from your bed, and a departure starts the same way. It also means a day trip is genuinely a day trip rather than an hour of commuting at each end: Nikko, Hakone, Karuizawa, even Kyoto for a long day, all start here.

One fare note. JR East raised its fares on 14 March 2026, by around 7.8 per cent, its first revision in thirty-nine years. Every JR fare figure published before spring 2026 understates what you will pay, which matters most for exactly the kind of trip this hotel is good for. IC card sales restrictions ended on 1 March 2025, so Suica and PASMO are freely available again; note that a Welcome Suica has no deposit and lasts 28 days, but any balance left on it is not refundable.

This is a comfortable, well-run, mid-range Japanese business-and-leisure hotel. It is not a design statement and it does not pretend to be. The staff are efficient and speak English, check-in is straightforward, and the lobby is small.

The distinguishing feature is that it offers Japanese-style rooms with tatami alongside conventional western ones – genuinely unusual in central Tokyo at this price point. If part of the appeal of Japan is sleeping on a futon on a tatami floor, and Hoshinoya is beyond the budget, this is the practical answer.

Rooms are compact. That is not a criticism of this hotel specifically; it is what central Tokyo costs. Expect to be organised about luggage, and use the luggage-forwarding services – sending a case ahead to your next city for a modest fee is completely routine in Japan and transforms a rail trip.

Rates are dynamic and the hotel does not publish a fixed nightly figure, so we do not print one.

Yaesu and Nihonbashi are business districts, which means quiet evenings and excellent weekday lunches. Nihonbashi itself is the point from which all distances in Japan were historically measured, and the old merchant-house department stores and knife shops around it are worth an hour.

Practically: Tokyo Ramen Street is in the station basement on this side, the Imperial Palace East Gardens are a ten-minute walk on the other side of the station and close on Mondays and Fridays, and Asakusa is twenty minutes by subway.

What you do not get here is nightlife. If you want to walk home from a bar, Shinjuku or Shibuya are the better bases and The Millennials is the cheap way to do it. This is a base for people who are leaving the city regularly, and it is the best of them.