Fujiya Hotel is where modern Japanese hospitality begins, at Miyanoshita in 1878. Sennosuke Yamaguchi opened Japan's first true resort hotel at a time when a Westerner had nothing to stay in but the old post-road inns, and he built it to meet that guest in a deliberately Japanese and Western form. A century and a half on, the whole stretch of that history is still standing.
What is rarest is that the architecture is itself the heritage. The Main Building (1891), the Western Annex, Kagetsuden and several other blocks were registered as Tangible Cultural Properties in 1997, so a guest does not stay next to the history but sleeps in it. Each block has its own face: undulating karahafu gables, coffered ceilings, hand-painted birds and flowers, carved beams. Meiji and Showa Japan imagining the West while holding on to its own spirit is here in built form, in rooms that can still be booked. Then there is the Miyanoshita onsen water, the view to the outer crater rim, and the traces left by Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon and Helen Keller.
As a first night, Fujiya delivers history, architecture and story in one move; the weight of the trip registers on the walk in. It suits culturally minded travelers and hosted groups who value narrative and formality, and for them a cultural property still in daily use is the right opening line.