Ask Shinichi Nakazono what he enjoys most about being an innkeeper and his answer will be an invitation to join him over a glass of shochu at his kitchen table. His home is Kagoshima, a breezy port city on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, where active volcano Sakurajima puffs and belches across the bay and windsurfing is king.
The middle-aged, goateed Nakazono loves nothing more than to spend warm evenings regaling his guests with stories of Kagoshima's history while extolling the virtues of shochu, Kyushu's immensely popular sweet-potato liquor.
Such moments make fond memories for travellers who hang their hat for a night or two in his two-storey wooden inn, Ryokan Nakazono, which stands behind a Buddhist temple in the quiet neighbourhood of Yasui.
A steaming cup of green tea, a futon rolled out across tatami mats, the peal of a temple bell as a wake-up call - the simple pleasures of staying at a ryokan (traditional inn; literally 'travel lodging') are tempting increasing numbers of foreign visitors from Japan's sterile hotel precincts. From the snowbound villages of Hokkaido to the subtropical islands of Okinawa, about 60,000 ryokan dot the archipelago, offering travellers - as they have done for centuries - a soothing hot bath, a wholesome meal and a sound night's sleep.
Ryokan tend not to be located in city centres or near major railway stations, but lie hidden in atmospheric outer neighbourhoods, clustered around mountain hot springs and in rural or even island settings.
Near the meandering Takase River, in Kyoto's Shimogyo district, a sense of timelessness pervades the narrow hallways of Ryokan Hiiraiwa, a 90-year-old inn with a weathered tiled roof and wood-crafted exterior that receives about 8,000 foreign guests annually. Its manager says most travellers simply want to spend a night stretched out on a futon amid the earthy smell of tatami grass before paying a visit to the incense-filled pavilions of nearby Higashi Honganji Temple the next morning.