Editorial standards

A property is listed if and only if it appears on the MICHELIN Guide hotel selection or the Relais & Châteaux member list, is in Japan, and is a stay rather than a restaurant. That is currently 161 properties. Payment, partnership and outreach have no effect on inclusion.

The English name is whatever the property calls itself on its own site, then its brand owner’s site, then its operator’s own English announcement. A booking site or a guide listing is not sufficient on its own. Where no English name has been published anywhere the property controls, the entry is held back rather than shown under a romanisation we invented.

Room counts come from the property. Where a third party disagrees with the property, the property wins; where two third parties disagree and the property is silent, the entry is flagged rather than resolved by picking one. Counts shown on this site — how many stays hold three Keys, how many are under ten rooms — are calculated from the catalogue at the moment you load the page, never written into the text.

Rates are per person, per night, with dinner and breakfast. Sources quote per-room-for-two as often as per-person, and confusing the two doubles the number, so every figure is normalised before it is stored. Where the per-person figure was derived by halving a two-person total rather than quoted directly, the page says so on the rate itself.

An empty field means the answer has not been established. It never means the answer is no. Three properties are recorded only as having private baths, with no source saying whether every room has one — they are shown as unknown rather than as some, because some would assert that not every room does, and nothing supports that.

Booking links are affiliate links. They are disclosed on every page that carries one. No property has paid to be listed, to be ranked, or to be described in any particular way, and there is no mechanism by which it could — the list is not ours to change.

If something here is wrong, tell us and it will be fixed. Where a correction changes a fact a reader may have acted on — a room count, a rate, a bath arrangement — the entry is updated and the source recorded.