The Hoshino family, silk merchants, struck hot water at the foot of Mount Asama after years of drilling, and opened the Hoshino Onsen ryokan in 1914; OKYTO has told that story in its article on the Hoshino Resorts’ Karuizawa origins. In 2005 the company rebuilt the old inn, on the same land, as the first … Read more
Katsuura Gyoen now goes by another name. On 1 April 2024 its operator, Mystays Hotel Management, renamed the hot-spring hotel on Nachi Bay Kamenoi Hotel Nachikatsuura and added it to Kamenoi Hotels, its chain of onsen hotels, which then counted 39 across Japan; the operator itself has traded as Iconia Hospitality since July 2025. The … Read more
In the Rangeet valley, Glenburn is still known as Kimble, after Kimble Murray, first manager of the garden a Scottish tea company planted in 1859. It has belonged for more than a century to the Prakash family, Kolkata tea planters whose patriarch, Lala Darshanlal, began as a small planter under British management and built up … Read more
Ada Villa stands on Observatory Hill, above the Chowrasta promenade at the top of Darjeeling, where the town’s first monastery once stood. In the late nineteenth century it was a boarding house for the young English and Scottish men sent out to manage the tea gardens below. When war came in 1939 it became a … Read more
Muwa Niseko occupies the top of Grand Hirafu village, ski-in and ski-out, and some of its units open straight onto the snow. South Korea’s Hanwha group developed it, GK H-SUMMIT operates it under the MUWA brand, and it took its first guests on 15 December 2023, with 113 rooms. It is a condominium hotel: the … Read more
Skye Niseko stands at the top of Hirafu-zaka, the street that climbs through the village, at the foot of the Grand Hirafu slopes between the King and Ace gondolas. Guests ski in and out, and in winter a free shuttle loops through the village every twenty minutes. Before it opened, the trade press called it … Read more
Hirafu-zaka is the main street of Upper Hirafu, climbing to the Grand Hirafu lifts with Mount Yōtei behind, and it lies inside a national park, under the Natural Parks Law. Sansui stands on it, built for Hirafu Capital, which Gendai Business described in 2024 as a Hong Kong-affiliated developer that owns and runs the hotel … Read more
Simon Cheong, the founder of the Singapore developer SC Global, began taking his family to Niseko for the skiing in 2012. He found the lodges, as he later put it, mediocre and expensive, and bought four plots of land around the resort. On one of them, a hectare beside the Grand Hirafu gondola station, his … Read more
Niseko’s Higashiyama ski area began in 1982, when Kokudo, the land company of the Seibu group, and the town of Niseko opened it with a Higashiyama Prince Hotel. Seibu sold the ski hill, the golf and the hotels to a Citigroup arm in 2006, and in 2010 the Malaysian group YTL bought the lot, by … Read more
Before the Second World War Japan promoted a programme of international tourist hotels, built to receive foreign visitors, and fourteen were completed. A 2022 survey of the type counts the Hotel New Grand in Yokohama and the Unzen Kanko Hotel among them, and calls the group the source of Japanese hotel architecture. One was the … Read more