There’s plenty of space to stretch out, but not much time to spare if you want to have this unique Japan travel experience.
We’d like to think that our writing here at SoraNews24 is of the sort that’s enjoyable to those of you who appreciate clever, colorful prose. So we were happy, but not necessarily surprised, when a reader recently contacted us to tell us about a very spacious hotel room they’d recently stayed in. How spacious?
“It was so big that you could do judo inside of it.”
Haha, nicely phrased! Sure, we figured that was a bit of an exaggeration for comedic effect, but we were still intrigued, which is how we found ourselves headed to Saitama City to stay for a night at Heritage Urawa Besshonuma Kaikan.
The hotel is located in the northwest corner of Besshonuma Park, itself a five-minute walk from Naka Urawa Station on the JR Saikyo line that connects Tokyo with Saitama Prefecture, its neighbor to the north.
▼ The walk from the station to the hotel
The entryway has a bit of the feel of a local administrative building to it, perhaps because the building was originally a leisure facility for Saitama prefectural government employees before access was expanded to include anyone looking for a hotel to stay in. That’s not to say it’s not a pretty place, though, and it has a sort of retro charm in its lobby and common-use areas.
But again, we were here to check out the “judo-sized” room that we’d heard about. It’s a Japanese-style room, with tatami reed flooring and a futon to sleep in, and in the manner of some traditional Japanese inns, the room even has its own name, Sadamine, which is also the name of a mountainous area in Saitama Prefecture’s Chichibu region.
▼ The kanji characters for Sadamine, 定峰, were written on the small placard attached to our room key.
We made our way down the quiet, carpeted hallways until we arrived at the door to our room, which also had Sadamine written above it.
Unlocking the door and sliding it open, we stepped into an entryway area, of the sort you’d find in a Japanese home, where we could take off our shoes and put them on shelves before heading farther in.
We had to admit, the entryway was really big.
Still, there was no way the room itself was big enough to do judo in…
…right?
Oh, wow! So it turned out the reader who’d clued us in on this place wasn’t exaggerating. After checking with the hotel staff, we learned that this room has a total floor space of 24 tatami mats, which converts to just about 43.8 square meters, and while that’s still not quite as big as the spaces sued for officially sanctioned International Judo Federation competitions, this place definitely looks big enough for some practice sparring.
Of course, you should refrain from actually doing any combat grappling here, since while it’s big enough to be a dojo, it is, after all, a hotel room, as evidenced by the futon sleeping mat that the staff had laid out for us smack dab in the middle of the floor.
We had so much floor space that it felt a little surreal. Lying in our futon, we had a vast tract of tatami between us and the TV…
…and the power outlet was so far away that going to charge our phone almost felt like going for an evening stroll.
Now, you might be assuming that we had to pay a fortune for such spacious accommodations. However, all we paid for a weekday night in the Sadamine room was 9,080 yen (US$59), and that even included breakfast the next morning.
But why does the hotel have such a huge room? Well, it’s primarily meant to be used by large groups, such as students on school trips or athletes on training retreats. There’s no attached shower, since the hotel has a communal Japanese-style bath for guests to use, so space-wise you could easily have 10 people staying together in this one room. However, on days when all of the hotel’s smaller rooms are already booked, and they have no large groups coming in, even solo travelers have a chance to book the Sadamine, and having so much personal space can make you feel like royalty, especially if you strike a pose like our Japansese-language reporter Masanuki Sunakoma is here.
With this being a weeknight, there weren’t all that many other guests staying in the hotel, and when Masanuki walked over to the Japanese-style bath…
…to his pleasant surprise, he had that all to himself too!
After a nice long soak, he returned to his palatially large room for some shuteye…
…and it wasn’t until he went down to the lobby the next morning for a simple breakfast of yogurt, a hard-boiled egg, a pre-packaged pastry, and a cup of coffee that he remembered that he was not, in fact, the new samurai lord of Saitama.
▼ Though really, it was a perfectly serviceable breakfast, especially for the price he’d paid for the room.
A night in the Takamine room is an incredibly unique and memorable travel experience, and one that we highly recommend. However, as you might have noticed from the photos, the Heritage Urawa Besshonuma Kaikan is getting on in years, and sadly, the management has determined that extensive renovations would be impractical to carry out. Because of that, the hotel will be closing for good on March 31, but that means there’s still time to spend one last night in the Takamine room, even if it’s also your first.
Hotel information
Heritage Urawa Besshonuma Kaikan / ヘリテイジ浦和別所沼会館
Address; Saitama-ken, Saitama-shi, Minami-ku, Bessho 4-14-10
埼玉県さいたま市南区別所4-14-10
Website
Photos ©SoraNews24
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
[ Read in Japanese ]