• Value
  • Location
  • Rooms
  • Cleanliness
  • Service

Juyoh Hotel (ホテル寿陽) is an unexpensive hostel-hotel in Kiyokawa (an area in the north-eastern part of Tokyo) which has been my “home” for a couple of weeks during my last trip to the capital of Japan.

Located quite far from the major tourist spots, with the sole exception of Asakusa being 30 minutes on foot (and unfortunately not linked directly by any metro line), it may prove to be more expensive if you add the transportation fees. Minami-Senju station is by far the closest and it’s only served by the JR Jōban line and the Tokyo Metro Hibiya line. The hotel itself is 10 minutes from it, a somewhat old ten storied building, with lobby and kitchen (free to use) on the first floor and rooms on the floors between the 2nd and the 9th; on the tenth and last floor you can find showers (2 for men and 2 for women) plus the japanese style bathroom (300¥ to use it, you need to ask the key to the reception).

Rooms are very small: mine was a single room and it measured 3 tatami (4,59 square meters) plus the tiny genkan at the entrance and a small area in front of the window. Considering the price paid, only about 25€ even with the change not exactly going in favor of the euro recently, you can’t really complain about the size.

Even with room cleaning being done every two days, the room will never be really clean. I often coughed due to an excess of dust and found out it came from the highest shelves, the fridge’s top and the air conditioner, whose filters had probably never been cleaned properly since installation.
There’s also the annoying fact that the cleaners don’t really have a schedule and they came at random hours, ranging from 12 to 17… with their best one being the first of January at 13 o’clock, waking up everybody after the celebrations for new year’s eve. Thankfully bathrooms and showers were always very clean.

The hotel provides its residents with 5 computers with internet access, in addition to the wifi covering every floor. Or at least they have them, but out of 5 computers, only a couple were good enough to use, the Apple and the Centrino with Windows Vista. Another one had Linux and was fairly decent, the one next to it though had Windows XP and lagged terribly… the last one was completely broken. Not to mention they went offline randomly at times.
When it comes to the wifi, well… it didn’t work quite often, leaving me unable to access internet from my room for hours in the evening. Very convenient, considering I wanted to upload my photos and update the blog. I had to use the lobby computers most of the time, which meant waiting my turn.

All things considered the place ain’t so bad, but I gotta be honest: I won’t be going back there for two main reasons: accessibility is very bad, you end up paying a lot of money to move around the city and it nullifies the cheapness of the room price. The second reason is the internet access; in a city with 100 Mbps connections in almost every house and Wi-Fis all around I would expect them to fix their bloody line. It was fast, really fast, but that counts nothing if you can’t use it half of the times.