A New Ryokan Just Opened Right Across From Miyajima’s Torii Gate

Hoshino Resorts opened a new ryokan this July called KAI Miyajima, and it changes something about how you can experience that famous floating torii gate.

It sits in Miyajimaguchi Onsen, on the mainland shore, directly across the water from Miyajima island. You are not staying on the island itself. You are staying across from it, close enough that several of the rooms and the top floor bath look straight out at Itsukushima Shrine and the gate sitting in the water in front of it.

There are 54 rooms total. Thirty of them come with a private open air bath. The four Special Rooms are 100 square meters each, also with a private outdoor bath, and pricing starts around 32,000 yen per person a night with dinner and breakfast included, based on two people sharing a room.

The bath is the part I would plan a stop for. It’s an infinity bath on the top floor that visually merges with the Seto Inland Sea, and the hot spring itself is a weakly radioactive sodium chloride spring, the kind Japan has used for centuries for joint pain and circulation. There’s also an Ishiburo, a stone sauna style specific to the old Setouchi region, heated by stones instead of steam. Most nights there’s a Shirabyoshi dance performance too, a style of dance and song that goes back to the Heian period, performed right there in the ryokan.

I bring up a brand new hotel for one reason.

Hiroshima and Miyajima get treated as a one night stop bolted onto a Kyoto or Osaka itinerary. A lot of families never consider staying in the area itself instead of running it as a same day trip off the shinkansen. That’s understandable. The ferry over from Miyajimaguchi takes about ten minutes and it’s covered by the JR Pass, so a day trip is easy to pull off.

But the island empties out by early evening once the day trip crowds get back on the ferry. If you stay over, you get the shrine grounds and the shopping street with almost nobody on them, and the deer have the place mostly to themselves too. A hotel like KAI Miyajima opening right there is a sign the whole area is getting taken seriously as a destination to sleep in, not just pass through.

That said, a ryokan built around a formal kaiseki dinner and a shared onsen isn’t automatically the right fit for young kids. Some ryokan build the whole evening around families. Others are quiet and adult paced, and a seven course dinner at 6pm with a nine year old is a specific kind of stressful. Before I book anything like this for a family, I check exactly how they handle kids at dinner, if there’s a private family bath option instead of only the big communal one, and what time the evening actually winds down. None of that is in the press release.

This is exactly the kind of thing I sort through before anyone books a room. If you’re building out a Japan itinerary that includes Hiroshima and Miyajima, you can see how the whole stop fits together on our Hiroshima & Miyajima city guide.