The Millennials Shibuya

The pod is larger than a traditional Japanese capsule – you can sit up in it comfortably – and comes with a proper mattress, power, lighting control and the projector. Locking storage for a suitcase is provided separately, as it always is in this format, and the pod itself is for you and a small bag.

Bathrooms and showers are communal and kept to Japanese standards, which is to say they are clean and there are enough of them. There is a lounge and a co-working space, which is one of the things that distinguishes this from the older business capsule hotels: it is designed for people who intend to spend waking hours in the building.

Rates move with demand and the hotel does not publish a fixed nightly figure, so we do not print one. The comparison worth making is not against another hotel but against the alternative of staying two or three stops out for a similar price.

It is not soundproof. A blind is not a door. In a room of pods you will hear alarms, zips, coughing and the corridor. Bring earplugs and an eye mask, or accept that you will be woken. This is the single most common reason people rate capsule hotels badly, and it is entirely predictable.

Check the floor arrangement. Capsule hotels in Japan are commonly arranged with separate male and female floors, or are single-sex entirely, and mixed accommodation is handled differently by different properties. If you are travelling as a couple or a mixed group, confirm the arrangement when you book rather than at check-in.

Luggage. Storage is provided but a capsule hotel is a poor place to live out of a large suitcase for a week. If you are in Tokyo for several days with a lot of luggage, consider forwarding cases ahead, which is cheap and routine in Japan.

Shibuya is loud. That is why you chose it, and it is still true at two in the morning.

Staying three minutes from Shibuya station changes what your evenings look like. The last trains in Tokyo run around midnight and the first at about five, and the gap is a genuine constraint: a night out that overruns turns into a taxi fare that costs more than the room. From here, you walk.

It also puts you on the Yamanote Line, the Ginza, Hanzomon and Fukutoshin subways and the Tokyu and Keio lines, which reaches most of Tokyo directly. Shibuya Sky is in the building complex above the station, and Meiji Jingu is a fifteen-minute walk north.

If you would rather be near the Shinkansen than near the nightlife, Hotel Ryumeikan Tokyo makes the opposite trade and makes it well. If the appeal here is the format rather than the price, Hoshinoya is the other end of the same idea – a building designed around a way of sleeping rather than a room.