Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo

A three-storey pagoda stands among camellias on a slope above the Kanda River in Bunkyō ward, Tokyo, and Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo wraps around it. The garden came first by more than a century. Yamagata Aritomo, field marshal and twice prime minister of Japan, bought the hillside in 1878 and named his villa Chinzansō, the mountain villa of camellias, after the wild camellias that had grown there since the Edo period.

History

Yamagata's estate passed in 1918 to the Osaka industrialist Fujita Heitarō. Fire-bombing in May 1945 destroyed the buildings and much of the planting. Ogawa Eiichi, founder of the Fujita Kanko company, bought the ruined grounds in 1948, replanted the hill and opened Chinzanso in 1952 as a garden restaurant and wedding venue. The hotel itself opened in 1992 as the Four Seasons Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo, the first Four Seasons in Japan. When that management contract ended at the start of 2013, Fujita Kanko continued under its own name as Hotel Chinzanso Tokyo.

Architecture and design

The garden holds the oldest things on the site. The Entsūkaku pagoda, attributed to the Muromachi period, was moved here from a temple in Hiroshima prefecture in 1925. A chinquapin tree said to be five hundred years old shades a path near the Shiratama Inari shrine, and a waterfall feeds the pond at the bottom of the slope. Since 2017 a mist installation called the Tokyo Sea of Clouds has rolled across the garden several times a day, the hotel's own answer to the mountain views Yamagata never had. The hotel building is a tall block in a European manner, with marble floors, chandeliers and wide corridors, and every public room is arranged to look onto the trees.

Rooms and suites

Rooms are large by Tokyo standards, with deep baths and separate showers, and face either the garden or the city. The garden side is the one to ask for: the pagoda is lit at night and the camellias flower in winter, cherry trees in early April, fireflies in late May and June.

Dining

Il Teatro serves Italian cooking in a dining room over the garden. Miyuki covers Japanese cuisine with a kaiseki room, a sushi counter and teppanyaki tables. Mokushundō, a stone-built restaurant standing inside the garden itself, cooks meat and vegetables on heated stones at the table, and Le Jardin, the lobby lounge, serves afternoon tea. Le Marquis is the bar.

Wellness

Yu, The Spa, is built around hot-spring water brought daily by tanker from Itō on the Izu peninsula, so that guests bathe in onsen water without leaving the city. The spa includes an indoor pool, a gym and treatment rooms. The garden paths, with their lanterns and stone stairways, double as the morning walk.

Weddings and events

Chinzanso has married couples since 1952, before there was a hotel, and remains one of the busiest wedding houses in Japan. Ceremonies take place at the garden shrine, in chapels or in the garden itself, with receptions in banqueting rooms of many sizes. The same rooms serve conferences and company dinners, and the hotel is used for large international gatherings that need a garden setting rather than a tower.

Location

The hotel sits in Sekiguchi, a quiet residential quarter of Bunkyō beside the Kanda River, about ten minutes on foot from Edogawabashi station on the Tokyo Metro Yūrakuchō line. Mejiro on the JR Yamanote line is a short bus or taxi ride. Haneda Airport is about 40 minutes by car and Narita about 90. The hotel is one of the rare luxury hotels in Tokyo outside the business districts, which is the reason guests choose it.