Nipponia Mino Shokamachi

Breakfast was an amazing spread of traditional food, and the manager helped us find a restaurant when the others we tried were full. The rooms are huge, set in a traditional Japanese home with beautiful sliding screen walls. This is the place to stay in Mino. Highly recommend!

The garden is lovely, and the Udatsu district nearby is great for a hearty shopping tour. Right next door is a Washi paper shop where local artists carry on a practice that’s been around for a decade. The hotel is beautiful, with very friendly staff. The interior feels deeply traditional, and the building uses mostly local materials. It also has artwork made from Minowashi, traditional paper, and sand from the local Nagara river. Western beds are available too.

I’d definitely come back, though I’d avoid December since a lot of shops are closed that time of year.

I chose this place because I wanted to enjoy Mino’s townscape. The tea room had been renovated beautifully and was incredibly charming. It was my first stay in a traditional Japanese house, and I was shocked by how many bugs there were. On the second floor I came across three different kinds of insects. When I opened an old drawer, a cockroach leapt out and ran under the bed. I panicked, lol. My husband got rid of them, so I went out to dinner. When I came back, bugs were clinging to every corner again, and ants were crawling on the bed. After we cleared them out again I went to bed, but moths kept banging loudly against the window, and I couldn’t sleep at all. Breakfast was set out on the first floor around 8:00 AM. The ingredients’ flavors were preserved, but honestly it tasted extremely bland and wasn’t very good. There were probably about three vinegar-heavy side dishes, which was a bit disappointing since I think lots of people don’t like vinegar. My husband can’t stand sour food and left some of his. The atmosphere was fantastic, but honestly, 56,000 yen per night felt too expensive for what we got.