I stayed at Japan's nicest hotel in Ozu, a town that reinvented luxury

This game-changing accommodation concept has seen a forgotten old town get a new lease of life as a tourist drawcard.

Fleur Bainger

4 min read

June 25, 2025 - 2:32PM

Lifestyle

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It’s not every day Japanese elders emerge from their homes to thank you for visiting, bringing emphatic bowing and crinkle-eyed smiles to the street. But Ozu is not your everyday town.

The historic hamlet on Japan’s less-visited Shikoku island in the country’s southwest does things differently.

Looking down the barrel of its heritage crumbling into disrepair, buildings abandoned as locals moved to bigger centres and modern homes, the township got creative. It decided to transform buildings saturated with stories into Japan’s largest “dispersed hotel”.

Hotel rooms, the reception and lounge are spread across Ozu’s entire old town, weaving renovated accommodations between local homes. It gives guests a flavour of local life and allows them to stay in repurposed buildings aged between 100 and 400 years old.

“We use existing properties; we don’t build anything new,” says Patrick Loyer, of the hotel’s development company, Value Management Group. “It helps people discover the area, feel like a local and disperse around. They’ll spend their money locally and it supports the local community.”

Nipponia Hotel in Ozu is a "dispersed hotel" where no two rooms are the same. Picture: Shoko Takayasu/Nipponia Hotel

In all, Ozu’s Nipponia Hotel has 31 luxury rooms within 26 buildings, each carefully restored to preserve as much of their past as possible. Gritty earthen walls made of mud, clay and bamboo straws stand proud, hefty wooden beams in mahogany hues frame ceilings and wood panelling skirts rooms. In keeping with their timelessness, none of the rooms have clocks or televisions (but they do have wi-fi).

“We retain original materials wherever possible,” Loyer says. “It means some things don’t glide seamlessly, but it’s authentic.”

The hotel opened in 2020 and has only been visitable by foreigners since 2023, the year Japan lifted its final travel restrictions post-pandemic. Ozu’s cultural salvaging has since seen the town named one of the world’s Top 100 Sustainable Tourism Destinations by Green Destinations. Meanwhile, Value Management Group has resuscitated some 85 historic buildings across Japan, from Kyoto to Nara and Osaka, drawing hotel guests keen to experience lesser-known areas.

The repurposed bedroom, now part of Nipponea Hotel. Picture: Fleur Bainger

My two-storey abode is in the former home of a wealthy silk merchant. His raw silk was regarded as the highest quality in all of Japan and selected for Emperor Showa’s enthronement ceremony in 1928. Ozu was once thick with mulberry trees, their leaves the food source of silkworms. The industry became so successful, silk cocoons were used as collateral for bank loans. My bedside lamps resemble cocoons and scrolls decorated with raw silk adorn the walls.

From my bedroom window, I overlook Ohana-han Street, its 7.2m width designed long ago, to stop fires spreading from houses and factories on one side to samurai residences on the other. I peer out at angular houses clad in weathered wood and rimmed with ornate, grey tiling. Nearby is a former tea shop built in the mid-Meiji period, a mansion once owned by a vegetable wax merchant, and an old medical clinic. All have been repurposed for the hotel, either for rooms or rent-reduced shops that usher energy into Ozu’s quietened core.

View of the Hiji River and Ozu town.

Centuries ago, most of the town’s production was transported along the Hiji River. “Hiji means elbow – it bends a lot,” Loyer says, as we board a traditional yakata (boat), teaming a bento breakfast with views of clear, jade-green water.

“Ehime Prefecture is so mountainous; it was easier to transport everything by river. And the tide would change, so you could take things in one direction in the morning and come back later in the day.”

Ozu Castle is the town's major landmark. Picture: Shoko Takayasu/Ozu Castle

These days the river is famous for cormorant fishing, where birds are used to catch and cough up fish for their masters. As we near the town’s modern bridge – replacing fishing boats that would be tied together for use as a plank walkway – majestic Ozu Castle emerges into view.

In 2020, it became the first in Japan to offer a castle stay. The original structure, with no heating, insulation, running water or plumbing, has been adapted to house up to six people a night for the equivalent of around $14,000.

“Castles in Japan were defence towers,” Loyer says. “Many of them didn’t have anyone sleeping in them overnight, so there were no bedrooms. Ours did, so it’s not a stretch to have people stay.”

A samurai-style welcome at Ozu Castle.

Castle guests are inducted as a feudal lord for the night, which means an airport pick up by samurai (a local wearing 10kg of armour), arrival by horseback at the castle and a butler to facilitate their every need.

Those without the coin can instead tour the open-to-the-public castle by day, or gaze as it glows on its hilltop perch by night, from the hotel’s fine dining restaurant, Le Un. Multiple courses are served on ceramic plates glazed in deep indigo, imitating those developed by a lord of Ozu about 250 years ago. Like everything in this town, it’s a harmonious blending of the old with the new. As I savour the most buttery soft wagyu I’ve ever tasted, it’s enough to make me want to run out to the street and thank the locals.

Fine-dining restaurant Le Un at Nipponia Hotel. Picture: Shoko Takayasu/Nipponia Hotel

The author was a guest of Japan National Tourism Organisation and All Nippon Airways.

How to get to Ozu, Japan

ANA flies direct to Tokyo from Sydney and Perth; take the included free domestic side trip to Matsuyama. From there, it’s a one-hour train, bus or car trip to Ozu.