noun

• A traditional Japanese inn.

  ‘I tried to book our ryokan today, and the woman couldn't understand a word I said, and was a tad rude, and I had to hand the phone over to Tamura.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Upstairs is reminiscent of a Japanese ryokan, or guesthouse, and the former banquet room still contains the stage where Japanese officers were once entertained.’
  • ‘Mr. Kawabata wrote the novel while staying in a small ryokan in Yuzawa Town, Niigata Prefecture (which now proudly refers to itself as ‘snow country’), in 1947.’
  • ‘The spring was duly found and the priest asked a disciple, a member of the Hoshi family, to open a ryokan.’
  • ‘We're staying at a ryokan run by one of the covert ops.’
  • ‘Because every hotel and inn and ryokan and minshuku within a very large radius was fully booked for the two nights of the festival, Echo and I had booked a room in Nagatoro, about a half-dozen stops away on the old country line railroad.’
  • ‘‘We have had problems with foreign guests,’ said the manager of another ryokan, who said she would take overseas visitors only with a recommendation from a local company.’
  • ‘One of the city's oldest ryokan, it has only 19 rooms, each one perfection in understated style.’