This hotel is about 7 minutes walk from the JR Meguro train station - take the west exit from the station & turn right - the hotel is 3 blocks down on the left side of the road. It has non-smoking rooms in a non-smoking wing (some other 'non-smoking' hotel rooms in Japan have simply had the ashtray removed, so this is a bonus). Meguro is slightly less frantic than staying around many of the other railway stations in Tokyo & the hotel is a real haven with a small garden & carp pond - hard to believe you're in a city of nearly 13 million people!

The staff are very polite & helpful, despite speaking very little English. The rooms are bigger than the average Japanese hotel room of the same class hotel although we did peer into other rooms as we walked past & realised that our twin (at the end of the corridor & next to the fire escape) was also bigger than most of them - about the size of a motel room in Australia. The bathroom is a small module, bit slightly bigger than other similar hotel bathrooms in Japan. Usual amenities are supplied - hairdryer, soap, shampoo etc & TV (no cable, all channels in Japanese only). The TV wasn't working when we arrived but someone arrived to repair it within 5 minutes of ringing down to reception.

There is a Tokyu supermarket between the hotel & the station which is open till late in the evening, where you can buy just about anything - the ground floor is a supermarket & upstairs is the equivalent of K-Mart. The restaurant in the hotel is expensive so we bought our breakfast supplies from the supermarket each night on our way back to the hotel.

A couple of doors up towards the station from the supermarket is a small Japanese restaurant called Kake. It only seats about 20 people & on both the nights that we went was frequented by salarymen stopping for dinner on the way home. It had the best value meals that we ate in Japan with fast service. While the menu is only in Japanese, each dish has a photo next to it so its not hard to work out what you want. There is one waiter there who speaks pretty good English - he spent a couple of years in the US as a child & was very keen to practice his English.

This was an easy part of town in which to stay & it was really nice to come home at night after a busy day sightseeing in a very busy & crowded city.