• Booked on hotels.com
• Less than 5 minute walk from Hakone Yumoto Station
• Great onsen with indoor and outdoor bath

• Overall pretty cool area, active sulphur vents were interesting and I love taking cable cars
• The black eggs boiled in hot spring water were not worth it! They tasted like regular boiled eggs
• Not recommended for people with respiratory issues due to sulphur

Egg

• There is a frequent free shuttle that takes 5 minutes from outside of Hakone Yumoto Station.
• You can reserve private baths by the hour!
• I’ve heard this place gets pretty busy on the weekends; I went on a quiet weekday, so I got lucky and was able to book a private bath on the spot. I think normally people should make reservations ahead of time.
• I got the type 1 private bath for 2 people for one hour and paid an extra fee to have access to the rest of the facilities too. I saw some pictures online of the larger private baths and they looked pretty luxurious.
• They have a great sauna there with something called “Loyly service” – someone comes every hour and fans steam onto you. It was unbearable for me but other people seemed to enjoy it.
• They have a restaurant where you can charcoal grill your own food.

Charcoal grill

• Naokichi is famous for yubadon (tofu skin rice bowl). Their yuba is made with Hakone hot spring water!
• They have an English menu
• To join the queue, you have to put in your info on a Japanese-only kiosk and you’ll receive a number. The tablet shows which number is next, so you can kind of keep track of where you are if you don’t speak Japanese
• There’s only 3 options on the menu – tofu omelet, or tofu omelet + other tofu dishes, or tofu omelet + other tofu dishes + drink/dessert. You should definitely order the combo (#2 or #3) – the tofu “sashimi” and the soft tofu are incredible.
• I don’t like yuba that much, but I still really enjoyed this place!

• You can get a beautiful, proper bowl of matcha here (hand whisked, no milk or sugar)
• The cafe has a great atmosphere
• They also serve traditional Japanese sweets (wagashi) and have some seasonal options. You should get their mochi (yumochi)
• They have a shop next door where you can buy their sweets for takeaway

• Soba made with grated mountain yam from Hakone!
• Very very popular – go right when they open if you don’t want to wait too long
• It was definitely tasty soba, but I’m not sure if I could tell the difference between it and other soba

• I didn’t realize this is a chain – they even have a location in Singapore
• Glorious parfaits
• Not a great simple tea selection – ended up with a sweetened green tea latte
• Their food selection was nice but nothing mindblowing – I had a salmon rice bowl
• Disturbingly noisy. I was stressed out just from sitting there because the place was jampacked with young people talking loudly at every table

• My travel companions wanted to see a maid cafe so we randomly picked this one right next to Akihabara station.
• I realized afterward that it is a large chain, so you shouldn’t go here if you want to support a smaller cafe.
• It’s kind of pricy. Food is mediocre as expected. You can pay for a performance, which is nice.

• Coco is a huge fast food curry chain. I love it and had it multiple times.
• Personally, I like chicken katsu much more than pork katsu. I also liked it with a spicy level of 2-3 out of 10. I tried 5 and 8 spicy off of my friends’ plates and it was unbearable.
• They have all-halal locations!
• If you want katsu, say “katsu”. They have fried chicken on the menu as a totally different item (more like karaage) so you should be clear what you want when ordering.

• Ichiran is probably the most famous ramen restaurant in Japan. I recommend going during off hours (e.g., find a 24/7 one and go at 6am when you’re jetlagged).
• My preference is strong both, light richness, lots of garlic, extra green onions, egg, extra chashu, 0-2 spicy.

• Junisoh is inside of the Hilton Tokyo (Shinjuku) hotel. I found it by searching for highly rated sushi restaurants on Tabelog (Japanese restaurant review website) and looking for places with online reservation forms.
• The online reservation system is great!
• The omakase was reasonable priced and quite nice. I recommend the 8 piece nigiri set. My group went with the 9 piece + sashimi and we were way too stuffed.
• I recommend this if you’re looking for good omakase but procrastinated on making plans and need to book a place online.
• I don’t recommend this if you’re looking for a place where the chef speaks English. (There are multiple sushi chefs though.)

• Sushiro is the biggest conveyor belt sushi chain in Japan. If you’re looking for a great conveyor belt experience, I recommend it.

• They have otters, groundhogs, hedgehogs, chinchillas, and rabbits
• You get to sit with a chinchilla in a basket on your lap – they are mindblowingly soft
• The two otters are just okay – you can feed them and touch their paws from a hole
• It was kind of expensive (I think around USD$30 for one hour, includes two drinks)

• This place was pretty depressing – it was a regular smoky bar with a cover charge and crappy drinks with penguins in a tank/cage near the back
• I did get to feed the penguins though
• I wouldn’t recommend it now that I’ve seen it… I didn’t realize it was a real bar

• Nice old school tonkatsu curry, recommended if you like going slightly off the beaten track

• There are quite a few APA Hotel locations, so make sure you’re looking at the right one on Google Maps. This is Kabukicho Tower.
• Good location near Shinjuku Station and near night life
• They have a small public bath section with several tubs!

• Good location, 5-10 minute straight walk from Sapporo Station and also 5-10 minute walk to Odori station
• Very small public bath
• Nice receptionists, were helpful in English when I wanted help with a reservation

• I went in the winter, so there were no local fruits in season
• You can get sea urchin (uni) / crab / salmon roe on a rice bowl for a pretty good price! I strongly recommend getting sea urchin here even if you haven’t liked it in the past. I think most sea urchin tastes unpleasant and bitter because it’s not fresh, but I love fresh, creamy, no-aftertaste sea urchin.
• You can also get crab, of course

• The crab option is tourist bait, don’t bother unless you really need to do it for the ‘gram (as I did)
• Really great broth
• I think this place is a great option if you want to try Hokkaido-style ramen (miso broth, corn with butter)

• It’s not a particularly special bar, but the staff do speak quite a bit of English

• My brother really wanted to go to a nice restauran with A5 wagyu at some point in our trip, so I found this place with reasonable reviews on Tabelog. They take reservations on Hot Pepper, but I wasn’t able to leave a Japanese phone number, so I had to call them. They accepted my reservation for the following day and we had a nice sectioned off table for 4.
• Pretty good price, high-quality meat, and had fun grilling it

• Surprisingly more fun than expected! I learned a lot about Sapporo’s history and didn’t realize how colorful it was.
• I took the bus to get there and it was quite difficult to find the actual museum – look for the information desk signs.

• Hokkaido is famous for soup curry!
• Their menu recommends the chicken curry and the roasted broccoli topping. I had both and they were quite good!

• This is a great place to get crab (grilled or hot pot), fresh sea urchin, and sashimi. There’s a ton of locations and you don’t really have to wait in line for long even if you show up in the late morning.
• I told my brother once that I have dreams like, I wish I could just buy an uncut block of sashimi fish and take a bite out of it, or buy one of those boxes of sea urchin and just eat it with a spoon… well at least I fulfilled the second dream for 5500 yen (USD$50).

• Pretty small place with two enclosures for bears and a small museum
• You get to feed the bears!!!!
• I recommend shelling out for the the 300 yen salmon treats. The bears don’t care much for the 100 yen biscuits
• The crows are evil and will try to snatch your treat, so don’t throw it when they’re around
• You get to take a cable car to the park!!!
• During other seasons, I believe they have squirrels, but I wasn’t able to see them this time

• I would absolutely shell out for this ryokan again if I went back to Hokkaido. It was amazing!
• They have one of the largest hot spring baths in all of Asia with five different types of hot spring water. The facilities are huge. It was my hot spring dream. Seriously, check out their photos on their website.
• I had the deluxe kaiseki meal served in my room. I thought it was a lot of fun to get to try a kaiseki meal because I’d never tried it before and the arrangement was beautiful. That said, I think I was better off eating at specific restaurants (e.g., a steakhouse for wagyu, a seafood restaurant for seafood…).

• It was an absolute delight, and I’d strongly recommend it for anyone who loves really great design or MUJI products. Everything in the hotel made me feel the “spark joy” heart pounding feeling.
• I originally booked the type A room for USD$138 for one night, but they gave me a free upgrade to a Type C room with a larger bed. Yay!
• You can take home some of their sample toiletries and the room slippers!
• I enjoyed getting to try their essential oil diffuser and other fun products.

• This is the restaurant on the lobby floor of the MUJI Hotel.
• They are a traditional Japanese restaurant focusing on fresh local ingredients.
• I thought the atmosphere was great, the food was delicious, and it was fun to use MUJI tableware.