Japan Ryokan Stay Guide

A night at a ryokan is one of the best things you can do in Japan — and one of the easiest to spend feeling quietly unsure. Where do the shoes go? Why is someone coming into my room? What just arrived at the table, and how am I supposed to eat it? This is a working toolkit for the night itself, not just a book about it. Everything runs on the device, with no signal, no account and no data collection. TONIGHT — YOUR LIVE RUN SHEET Choose your dinner time, your bathing plan, your breakfast time and your check-out, and the app builds your own arrival-to-departure schedule, then follows it against the clock. It tells you what is happening now, what is next and how long you have, warns you when your plan leaves no room for a bath, and lets you tick off each step as the evening goes. Your progress is kept between launches. SOAK TIMER Hot spring water is hotter than a bath at home, and the local habit is short soaks with a break between them. Pick a length, start it, and be told when to get out, cool down and drink water. It counts the soaks you have finished today. REQUEST CARD BUILDER Tick what you need from 50 options — allergies, no raw fish, vegetarian, a later futon, a bigger yukata, a taxi at 09:00, the private bath at 19:30, an extra quilt, a lost key — and the app writes them out as one polite Japanese card you can hand across the desk. Choose a time and it lands inside the sentence. Tick anything marked ALLERGY and the card automatically adds a warning asking the kitchen to check stocks and seasonings too. Any card can be read aloud in Japanese by the device. RYOKAN ETIQUETTE CHECK Thirty questions on the things guests actually get wrong — the yukata, the towel, the lidded bowl, the tipping, the chopstick rest. Every answer comes with the reason, the ones you miss are collected for review at the end, and your best score is kept. Play a quick ten or the full thirty. KAISEKI COURSE DECODER Dinner arrives one small dish at a time. Tap whichever course just landed on your table and find out what it is, what to expect inside it, and exactly how to eat it — from the opening bite to the rice that tells you the meal is closing. Plus a dictionary of 18 words that appear on the handwritten menu card. YUKATA DECODER Everything hanging in your closet: the robe, the sash, the padded outer layer, the sandals, the bath basket — and the one rule you must not get backwards. SPOKEN JAPANESE The device reads the Japanese out loud — phrases, dish names, garment names and your finished request card — so you can hear it before you say it, or simply let the phone say it for you. THE GUIDE ITSELF 114 entries in plain English: ryokan vs hotel, what the per-person rate really includes, arrival and check-in, the inn baths, the evening, breakfast and check-out, etiquette and taboos, the kinds of inns, reading the room, the futon and the in-room amenities. Plus 30 ready-made phrases with a full-screen show-to-staff mode, full-text search across everything, and a star list for what you want to keep. Works in a mountain valley, on the train, in the changing room. No account, no ads, no network access, and nothing about you leaves the device.