Why we filter instead of naming hotels
- The call
- The book names no hotel. It gives the criterion that lasts — which corridor city, and how close to the one long Shinkansen leg — and lets you apply it to whatever is well-reviewed and available on your dates.
- What it depends on
- The corridor model (Tokyo–Kyoto, with Hakone/Nikko/Nara as day trips) is structural — it is the shape nearly every first-timer’s itinerary already takes, not a guess about which specific property is good this season.
- What we don’t know
- Which hotel will still be well-run, well-reviewed, and available on YOUR dates eighteen months from now. A name printed today is a guess with a byline; a filter still works.
- What would flip it
- A reader doing one long multi-city loop instead of the two-base corridor needs a different filter entirely (distance to the next departure station, not distance to "the" corridor) — the book says so rather than forcing the default.
- What we refused
- A ranked list of named Tokyo/Kyoto hotels. We haven’t slept in them, and a listing with a confident voice on top of someone else’s reviews is exactly the kind of claim this book won’t carry a mark for.
Last changed: 2026-10-10 — a third-round fact audit tightened the day-trip arithmetic the filter leans on, so the corridor math and the chart agree on how many full days a base actually returns.