Iwaso

Miyajima's grand old inn since 1854 — the island after the day-trippers leave, historic villas and Hiroshima oysters, but a radon spring that is heated, and service that has thinned

Iwaso began in 1854 as a teahouse in Momijidani, the maple valley behind Itsukushima Shrine, and has hosted the imperial family — corridor photos show statesmen such as Itō Hirobumi and Ōkuma Shigenobu — and, more recently, working dinners for the G7 foreign ministers (2016) and the 2023 G7 summit. It has 38 rooms in three very different forms: a five-room early-Shōwa wooden main building (no bath, steps everywhere), a 1981 concrete New Wing with its own bathrooms and a lift, and four detached villas, one of them where Yoshikawa Eiji wrote his Heike saga. What every Japanese blogger loves is staying the night on the island: after the last day-trippers leave, guests walk to the lit-up great torii after dinner and reach the shrine at opening time with almost nobody there, with deer wandering the garden. Dinner, in the dining room rather than your room, leans on Hiroshima oysters and conger eel, and scores well (4.5 on one major site). The bath uses the inn's own Wakamiya spring, a cold radon spring that is heated and diluted — pleasant and often empty, but not free-flowing hot-spring water. The recurring 2025–2026 complaints are about service and upkeep rather than setting: slow or absent staff at breakfast, cold breakfast dishes, mould in the bath, a villa that was too hot, flying ants in another, and reviewers noting that most guests are now from overseas. Ratings sit at 4.4 across three major sites.