Japan

Japan is a country of thresholds. A door slides back onto a garden composed to be seen from one place on the floor; a bath is drawn before dinner; a meal follows what the month has brought. The seasons are short and closely watched, from the powder months of Hokkaido to the warm water of Okinawa and the lemon harvest on the islands of the Seto Inland Sea. Hospitality here has always been less about the room than the ritual.

We keep Japan deliberately short: four houses, each in a different register, and the journeys between them. In Hokkaido, Setsu Niseko stands in Grand Hirafu, the largest ski resort of Niseko United, between Mount Yotei and Mount Annupuri. Its 190 suites are finished in warm timber, washi paper and shoji screens, and the four bedroom suites and penthouses keep a private Kakenagashi onsen on the terrace, facing Mount Yotei. Winter brings some 15 metres of powder snow; when it melts, Niseko turns green, for hiking, rafting and hot air balloons at sunrise.

Far to the south, on a peninsula on Miyakojima in Okinawa, Rosewood Miyakojima is Rosewood’s first resort in Japan: 52 villas and three Houses, each with a private pool, shaped by Ryukyu limestone and the Japanese spirit of wabi-sabi above the clear water known as Miyako Blue. Miyakojima is still called the island of prayer, and its crafts are close at hand, from a shisa shaped with the master artisans of Kinjo Pottery to Miyako jofu, the island’s living textile tradition.

On the Seto Inland Sea, Azumi Setoda, the first house of Azumi, occupies the 1876 estate of the Horiuchi family, salt and shipping merchants, restored by the Kyoto architect Shiro Miura in the sukiya-zukuri tradition. Twenty-two rooms open to private gardens or balconies, each with a hinoki cypress bath, and the Shimanami Kaido, the cycling road that hops between islands on a chain of bridges, is at the gate.

Further south again, off the tip of Kyushu, Sankara Hotel & Spa Yakushima sits between forest and sea on Yakushima, which in 1993 became Japan’s first UNESCO Natural World Heritage site. Ocean view suites and villas in a tropical garden share an infinity pool above the sea, a private sauna of local jisugi cedar and Okas, a full course restaurant whose menu changes every night, with guided days in the ancient cedar forests and mountains of the island.