Atami

Atami is a town with a past, and it wears it beautifully. Lia and I went half out of curiosity — I’d read that this old hot-spring resort on the Izu coast had boomed in the postwar decades as the honeymoon capital of Japan, then faded as tastes changed, and was now filling up again with young Tokyoites hungry for exactly the retro seaside charm their grandparents had loved. That story turned out to be visible in the streets: neon signs and Shōwa-era coffee shops sitting alongside sleek new cafés, grand old cliffside hotels being lovingly refitted. The town climbs steeply up from a curved bay, hot-spring steam rising here and there between the buildings, and the whole place has the slightly faded, deeply comfortable feeling of a favourite seaside resort out of season.

Steam Above the Bay

The onsen is the reason Atami exists — the name itself means “hot sea”, and the springs have drawn bathers since long before the railway. We stayed in a hillside ryokan with a bath open to the air, and I will not soon forget lowering myself into hot mineral water at dusk with the whole bay laid out below, ferries crossing it, the lights of the town coming on in tiers up the slope. Lia stayed in until her fingers pruned. Down in town you can wander between public baths and free footbaths, and there’s a strong smell of sulphur and salt on the sea breeze that somehow becomes part of the pleasure. It is a town built around the simple, civilised act of getting into hot water and looking at the sea.

Fireworks Over the Water

Atami’s other great institution is its fireworks. Unusually, the town holds hanabi festivals many times a year rather than just once, launching the shells from a barge in the bay so the surrounding hills act as a natural amphitheatre and throw the sound back across the water. We happened to catch one, and it was among the best I’ve seen anywhere — not because the fireworks themselves were grander than elsewhere, but because of the setting, the whole crescent of the town watching from balconies and the seafront, the booms rolling around the bowl of hills. We found a spot on the promenade with a can of cold beer each, and Lia leaned into me and said this was the most Shōwa thing we’d done all trip, and she meant it as high praise.

The Old Seaside Charm

By day we mostly wandered, which is the right way to take Atami. We climbed the steep lanes to the MOA Museum of Art, high on the hillside with a famous escalator tunnel and a sweeping view over the coast, and its collection of Japanese art and its recreated tea house made a serene contrast to the neon below. We poked into a kissaten — an old-fashioned coffee house — with velvet chairs and a cream soda in a tall glass, exactly the sort of place the young crowd now comes seeking. And we walked the seafront and the little Propose Beach, and ate steamed local fish. Atami doesn’t dazzle; it soothes. It is a holiday town in the oldest sense, and after the intensity of Tokyo it was precisely what we needed.

Getting There

Atami is one of the easiest escapes from Tokyo: the Tōkaidō Shinkansen stops here, putting the town under fifty minutes from Tokyo Station, and slower local trains on the Tōkaidō Line run the same route for less. That closeness is exactly why it boomed as a resort and why the weekend crowds are returning. The town is steep, so buses help with the climb to the ryokan and the MOA Museum, though the seafront and station area are walkable. Atami is also the gateway to the wider Izu Peninsula, so it pairs well with a longer coastal trip south. Come for a summer fireworks night if you can time it, or in winter, when early plum blossoms open in the hillside gardens and the baths feel best of all.