It just doesn’t get any better than this. If in your travels you prefer the charms of traditional Japanese ryokans to big city satin-sheet luxury, consider guntû (always written with a lower-case ‘g’ and pronounced “gantsu”), the wonderful floating Ryokan that plies the gorgeous Seto inland sea while providing unparalleled cuisine, soul-soothing surroundings and an array of superior services. This truly is a bucket-list adventure, and you’ll never experience another trip like it.
Designed by Japanese architect Yasushi Horibe and commissioned in 2017, on the outside guntû looks like a boxy gray warehouse with a rustic peaked roof dropped on top. But when you step aboard and gaze up guntû’s three-story spiral staircase, you are ushered into a land of peace and serenity, lined with acres of polished wood and imbued throughout with a calm Zen sensibility.
A Remarkable Venue
Horibe’s elegant signature wood paneling is featured in all of guntû’s shared spaces and continues inside the guest suites. guntû’s lower two decks contain 19 suites for its 38 guests, the ship’s spa and massage facilities, a gym, and gender separated communal baths with saunas (rotated daily).
The top deck, lined outside with protected outside sightseeing porches along the side decks called engawas, houses the dining area, a sweeping forward-facing semicircular bar (manned by a skilled and jovial barman), and a large forward outdoor observation deck, as well as the six-seat sushi bar and a comfortable aft-facing indoor lounge that looks out over the majestic mountains and islands of Setouchi.
All suites have private terraces and sitting rooms with splendid views ―including a soothing view from your windowed bathtub. Middle to high-end suites also offer sumptuous open-air baths. The premium guntû suite is the only one with a sweeping front-facing view, but all rooms come with a full set of amenities―yukatas, a refrigerator and wine cooler, a writing desk, WIFI, an iPad to access all services, and a comfortable sofa and table.
Exceptional Service, Exceptional Services
Every member of guntû’s staff is gracious, responsive and willing to do whatever is necessary to accommodate passenger needs and whims. While many conduct themselves with a rather formal Japanese “service face,” all are eager to personalize your passenger experience. We enjoyed getting to know many of them, notably the wonderfully upbeat staff and mixologist extraordinaire.
Although English fluency is not universal among the crew, you will have no difficulty getting your concerns and requests addressed promptly. Attention to other details is noteworthy, such as the well-stocked chilled wine rack and beverage cooler in your room, the racks of warmly-padded overcoats in the third deck hallway awaiting passengers who want to walk the decks outside on cooler days, and the bright orange yuzu fruits provided to impart aromatic delight both to the communal baths and to your personal bath.
While you may be tempted to lounge in your private quarters all day, guntû boasts excellent wellness facilities and services to draw you out of your room. Yoga devotees are welcome to do their sun salutations on the deck in the mornings. The spa on the second deck boasts outdoor hinoki (cypress) baths, day beds to enjoy the sun and breeze, as well as two saunas. guntû also has a fully-furnished gym. The spas offer several soothing treatments, notably the Japanese-style nentai massage, an approach created exclusively for guntû. We can affirm that this unusual deep tissue technique really works.
Cuisine that Defies Description
In other settings it may be pretentious to describe food as ‘gastronomy.’ On guntû, no other term applies. The eclectic menu has a novel approach to selecting your meals. Rather than locking you into set menus or lengthy kaiseki experiences, guntû subscribes to a flexible culinary motto: “Enjoy what you want, as much as you want, when you want.” Want to keep coming back for more? Want to go light? Go ahead, do it your way.
The food, whether breakfast, lunch, dinner, sushi bar, or tea ceremony, is uniformly superb and intensely local, often sourced mere minutes before from the farm or the sea. With the seafood, it is not ‘the catch of the day,’ it is ‘the numerous catches of the day,’ all first presented to you uncooked before you make your selections. Whether your choices are western-inspired, esoteric Japanese ingredients, or a combination of both, your meal will delight your eye as well as your palate.
The sushi bar, supervised by Nobuo Sakamoto of the sushi restaurant Nobu at Awajishima, is exceptional, both in the quality and variety and in the fun of watching the sushi chefs’ dazzling knife work. Our eclectic group of eight guests at the bar, Japanese and gaijin alike, soon found ourselves comparing notes―language barrier be damned―and laughing with collective pleasure.
If you are interested in another cross-cultural experience, at a time of day of your choosing, you select the ‘Experience of Tea Ceremony.’ In the ship’s lounge area overlooking the sea, you first watch a tea master create traditional wagashi sweets before he takes you through the intricacies of the tea ceremony, providing a rare opportunity to watch an artisan plying his trade.
A Singular Experience
For us, one particular dinner adventure typified guntû’s culinary excellence. At our noontime meal, we had binged in the delights of the sushi bar, and at dinner Doug pronounced himself 'fished out.' He let his eyes meander over the less prominent items on the menu, and down at the bottom, he saw an innocuous-sounding entry: beef stew. Imagining potatoes, carrots and hunks of meat floating in some kind of brown soupy gravy, he opted to give the course a try anyway.
What arrived was a small round plate with what appeared to be small squares of beef bathed a thick deep maroon sauce. Doug took one bite and exclaimed in astonishment, “this is absolutely the best bite of food I have ever tasted in my life!” Skeptical, Pam took a bite of what turned out to be wagyu beef in a very special demi-glace sauce that we later learned takes days to prepare. “You’re right,” Pam said. “It is the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life.” And she ordered another portion, pictured here.
Itinerary Choices and Prices
The cost of your guntû experience can vary widely, depending on the season you travel and the itinerary you book, most of which are two or three nights. The ship departs from the Onomichi’s Bella Vista Marina in Hiroshima Prefecture and roams across the seas of the Setouchi region without docking at any port, instead anchoring to allow passengers to disembark on shore excursions and activities.
guntû trips follow many different eastward, central and westward routes, and they offer a variety of off-ship sights, excursions and shore activities. You will want to visit guntû’s website to see all the options, and you will undoubtedly be coordinating with them frequently online as you plan your itinerary. Start your planning early: most voyages are fully-booked well in advance of departure.
A guntû experience is not for tight budgets, and prices are going up in 2025, both shoulder season (before April) and high season. Currently, the least expensive off-season terrace suite costs 575,000 yen (about $3,668 USD) and a suite with open-air bath costs 100,000 more ($4,305 USD). The larger starboard-side Grand Suite costs 925,000 yen ($5,900 USD), and the full-width Zagantsu suite, with its sweeping forward view, is priced at 1,075,000 yen ($6,856 USD). In the high season, these rates increase to 625,000 ($3,950), 725,000 ($4,625), 925,000 ($5,900) and 1,1250,000 yen ($7,175) respectively. The prices are for two nights, all inclusive except spa massage and rare bottles.
