EJ Anime Hotel opened within the “cool Japan” Sakura Town Shin Tokorozawa in Autumn of 2020, and unexpectedly closed less than three years later on May 31st 2023. Citing, essentially, a business failure.
Original post from 2020
The Sakura Town is a project by the Kadokawa Corporation- one of the largest publishing companies in Japan – and Tokorozawa city. Apart from books, mooks, magazines and manga, Kadokawa also produce games, anime and movies. The complex combines the “intellectual property” of the publishing giant to provide an entertainment town like nothing seen in Japan before.
Other than the EJ anime hotel, the leisure town offers the Kadokawa Musashino museum, which has an EJ Anime Museum on its 3rd floor. There is also the Cool Japan shrine, the Kadokawa restaurant (just one of several eateries), shops and event space. Moreover, in the neighboring park there is a Team Lab “Acorn Forest” permanent outdoor exhibition.
This post was originally published in the event section with the information for the hotel opening event that took place on October 1st 2020. It was moved to the main section of the blog on December 14th 2020, to give it a permanent URL.
EJ Anime Hotel
The EJ of the name stands for Entertainment Japan. The hotel isn’t particularly large with only 33 rooms. The rooms are not anime themed, in the typical sense. In fact, they are very basic minimalist type rooms. However, each room has the paraphernalia of the selected anime theme to each room, as per the above image. Moreover, all rooms are equipped with a 150-inch large screen projector, a sound bar that allows you to enjoy high-quality 3D sound, and Hue lighting that emits light in various colors and intensities, so you can immerse yourself in the world of your favorite images.
Character parties
Anime writer Higepika wrote in a review before the official opening that the hanging racks are larger than most, ‘ideal for cosplay’. And as the hotel hosts “character parties”, room for the costumes is very important! The photo posted with her report in Kadokawa’s Tokorozawa Walker (magazine linked near the bottom of the post) showed a large full length mirror by the larger than average wardrobe space. She also pointed out that the voice on the room’s wake-up alarm is character voices!
The entrance lobby of the hotel, which is 5G enabled, has a giant screen which show scenes from the seasonal anime. There are five anime that are working in collaboration with the EJ hotel at the moment. They will work it on a rotation system with other Kadokawa anime titles joining forces at a later stage. The first five were: Bofuri, Uzaki-chan wants to hang out, Konosuba, A certain scientific railgun and Yuki Yuna is a Hero.
From winter 2021 to spring 2022 they had Whistle theme rooms as well as Obey Me, Yuki Yuna, Durarara and Kakuriyo. Since the summer of 2022 things are a bit different. For one, they are offering “plain” rooms from July 1st. Moreover, there only seems to be just one anime collaboration in the works at the moment. That is, with “Bakuten” or Backflip as the anime is called in English. However, they also have a really special theme room in conjunction with the Immersive Van Gogh exhibition in EJ Anime Museum:
Latest information:
- Van Gogh themed rooms until December 8th, a Van Gogh themed dinner is also available (separate booking)
- Plain rooms from July 1st
And then of course there’s the added bonus that the hotel is relatively near the Sayama Hills (that inspired My Neighbor Totoro).
The hotel, like the rest of the Sakura Town development, was actually supposed to open the summer of 2020. However, due to the Coronavirus outbreak they set the opening date back to October 1st 2020. Booking opened a month earlier from September 1st.
Prices
The price for a “collaboration room” with dinner and breakfast included prices start from 19,800 yen for one person. If there is more than one person the prices go down per person. The meals are specific to the anime you choose. You get a commemorative take home present. The delux plan has some extras.
Sakura Town
The grand opening of “Sakura Town” itself was on November 6th. However, some of the attractions within the leisure complex have been open since August – such as the Kadokawa Musashino Museum and the Team Lab Acorn Forest.
The summer edition of the Kadokawa Tokorozawa Walker has a guide to Sakura Town, in Japanese, including information on the EJ Anime Hotel. It was released on July 31st 2020.
Unless stated otherwise, images are copyright of the Ilya Corporation 2018 and / or Sakura Town, all were taken from the official Sakura town website.
EJ Anime Hotel Information
Official website – currently Japanese language only.
Access : about a fifteen minute walk from Higashi Tokorozawa station.
Also opened recently in Saitama: