The Tokyo Station Hotel

After six years of painstaking reconstruction, The Tokyo Station Hotel is back in business — and the Tokyo hotel landscape is infinitely richer for having it back. Not that this city is lacking in impressive lodgings; it’s just that none of this town’s high-rise, forward-looking luxury hotels can quite prepare you for the low-rise, European-style, 1915-vintage elegance of Tokyo Station.

From this side of the station, facing Marunouchi, you’d never know the other ninety percent of Tokyo Station existed, from the tangle of railway lines to the rabbit warren of underground restaurants and the shop-crammed indoor city of the station’s Yaesu side. With its own dedicated entrance, The Tokyo Station Hotel sees surprisingly little of the station’s traffic — and though it’s owned by Japan Railways, as the outfit’s flagship hotel, it’s obviously a cut above the rest of the JR offerings. The old prewar domes that top the building were the exclamation point on the renovation, a historic gesture that’s all the more poignant in a city where prewar anything is pretty thin on the ground.

As for the nuts and bolts of the place, it’s a first-class modern business hotel, with all that label implies: big, stately, high-ceilinged guest quarters, a range of bars and restaurants from smart-casual to fine-dining, and a spa that’s strikingly modern and minimal, in stark contrast with the hotel’s classic red-brick elegance. The word “swanky,” comes to mind, and it seems entirely apt. Meanwhile Ginza’s retail paradise, the newly vibrant Marunouchi district, and the Imperial Palace are all close at hand — as, on a slightly less grandiose note, is Tokyo Ramen Street, humbly tucked away in an underground corner of the railway station.

Please note: This hotel offers both smoking and non-smoking rooms.