Imaihama Onsen Kirinokahori Sakuraku

Set on a hillside 28 metres above Imaihama beach, Sakuraku receives no more than four groups each day, a constraint that becomes its defining asset. In operation since the mid-2000s and under the stewardship of Ono Photo Studio since October 2020, the ryokan has preserved its essential character: rooms built from solid paulownia and cedar, walls finished in diatomaceous earth and natural persimmon tannin, and an ethos of measured intimacy that its scale makes possible rather than aspirational.

Each of the four rooms, named Poem of Waves, Garden of the Sea, Above the Clouds, and Flower of the Sky, opens onto a private rotenburo fed by the Minemotoya naturally-flowing sodium chloride spring. The water arrives continuously and untreated at any hour of the night or day. Stone, Shigaraki pottery, hinoki cypress, and ceramic bowls define the character of each bath; what they share is the unobstructed Pacific horizon beyond the terrace rail.

Dinner is served in a fully private dining room. The kitchen draws on contracted hon-wasabi farmers in the Izu interior, day-boat kinmedai from coastal waters just below the property, and Izu beef, a herd of fewer than one hundred head shipped annually, lean and sweet with a clean umami that distinguishes it from better-known Wagyu breeds. Abalone arrives grilled over charcoal. The creative kaiseki sequence is presented in a boat-shaped vessel the inn has made its signature, and each course arrives at precisely the moment described by the staff when you sit down.

Where Sakuraku has less to offer is in the register of cultural depth. The tokonoma in each room is not systematically renewed with the season, and the garden, though planted with Kawazu cherry, camellia, iris, and persimmon to mark the turning year, does not yet communicate a seasonal programme with the precision that properties of similar scale sometimes achieve. Guests who come seeking a formal cultural immersion will find the inn reaches its best in the kitchen and the bath, and holds something back elsewhere.

The morning after a night in the hammock chair on the terrace, watching the Izu Peninsula hills go pale pink in the first light and the Pacific settle into colour below them, is the sensory image Sakuraku was built around. For the guest who finds that sufficient, it is entirely sufficient.