Nara Hotel

This guide to the Nara Hotel centers on December 1922, when Albert Einstein checked in while touring Japan, freshly aware he had won the Nobel Prize, and sat down at the piano in what is now called the Cherry Blossom Room despite admitting he was no pianist. It traces the hotel back to 1909, when railway architect Tatsuno Kingo raised it in cypress wood as a guesthouse for the imperial family and visiting heads of state, and follows the other famous names who later stayed here, including Charlie Chaplin and Helen Keller. Look for the lobby fireplace, framed like a miniature shrine gate and flanked by stone guardian lions, much as it looked when Einstein arrived.