“A deer on Miyajima stole a map from my back pocket and ate most of Itsukushima Shrine before I got it back.”

The streetcar from Hiroshima Station takes about half an hour to reach Ujina, and by the last few stops you start wondering if you've overshot the city entirely. The buildings thin out. The harbor smell arrives before the harbor does. At the Ujina terminus, you step off into a neighborhood that feels more like a fishing town than the edge of a city that rebuilt itself from nothing — warehouses, a convenience store with a cat asleep on the ice cream freezer, a couple of ferry terminals with hand-painted departure boards. The Grand Prince sits at the end of a spit of reclaimed land here, a curved high-rise tower visible from several blocks away, looking like it wandered over from a bigger city and decided to stay.

You can also take the hotel's shuttle bus from Hiroshima Station — it runs several times a day and saves you the streetcar fare — but the tram ride through Minami-ku is worth doing at least once. You pass the Mazda factory, a stretch of pachinko parlors, and a tofu shop with a line out the door at 10 AM. The approach tells you something important: this hotel isn't in the thick of the Peace Memorial Park district. It's in its own pocket of Hiroshima, the port side, where the city faces the Inland Sea.

A room that faces the right direction

The building is a full crescent, which means nearly every room bends toward the water. This is the thing the Grand Prince gets right before anything else — the geometry. You walk into a room that's clean, reasonably sized by Japanese standards, with the kind of firm double bed that Japanese hotels have perfected (not too soft, not a punishment), and then you open the curtains. The Seto Inland Sea stretches out flat and silver, dotted with islands, ferries cutting white lines across the surface. Miyajima's torii gate is out there somewhere, invisible at this distance but present in the way everything here seems to orient toward it.

Mornings are the best time in the room. I wake up around six to watch fishing boats head out from the pier directly below, their engines a low rumble that vibrates faintly through the window glass. The bathroom is compact — the standard Japanese unit bath, plastic and functional, hot water instant and scalding if you're not careful with the dial. The room's carpet has seen better decades, and the furniture has that particular late-1990s Japanese hotel aesthetic: blond wood, rounded edges, a desk lamp that belongs in a middle manager's office. None of this matters when the window is doing what it does.

The hotel's real trick is the pier. Ferries to Miyajima leave from a terminal that's essentially at the front door — a 26-minute high-speed boat ride, no transfers, no navigating bus connections to the Miyajimaguchi ferry on the mainland. You walk out of the lobby, buy a ticket, and you're standing among wild deer and vermillion shrine gates within the hour. The return trip in the evening, as the sun drops behind the islands, is one of those travel moments that costs almost nothing and delivers almost everything.

“The Seto Inland Sea doesn't perform for you. It just sits there, flat and silver, and somehow that's enough.”

Breakfast is a buffet spread across a ground-floor restaurant with — again — the windows. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki doesn't appear (that's a street food, not a hotel breakfast), but there's a solid miso soup station, grilled fish, and the kind of Japanese hotel rice that's always inexplicably better than what you make at home. Western options exist for the unconverted. I watch a woman at the next table methodically photograph every single dish on her tray before eating, a ritual that takes longer than the meal itself.

The hotel grounds include a small garden and a chapel that hosts weddings on weekends — you'll hear cheering if you're poolside on a Saturday. The pool itself is seasonal and modest. There's a convenience store in the lobby level, which matters more than it sounds: Ujina doesn't have the density of shops you'd find in central Hiroshima, so a late-night onigiri run means the elevator, not a walk. The staff operates with that particular Japanese hospitality that's precise without being stiff — one front desk clerk drew me a map to a local izakaya in Ujina that wasn't in any guidebook, a tiny place called Teppan Sakaba with counter seating and the best grilled oysters I had in the prefecture.

The honest note: the location is a trade-off. You're twenty-five minutes by streetcar from the Peace Memorial Park, the A-Bomb Dome, and the dense restaurant streets of Nagarekawa. If you want to stumble home from a bar at midnight, this isn't your base. But if Miyajima is the reason you came to Hiroshima — and for many travelers, it is — the Grand Prince eliminates a full hour of transit each way. That math changes your trip.

Walking back to the pier

On the last morning I take the streetcar back toward the station instead of the shuttle, and this time I notice the things I missed arriving — a small memorial stone tucked between two apartment buildings, a bakery called Anderson that's been open since 1967, a group of high school students in matching tracksuits jogging along the river. Hiroshima keeps doing this: folding the ordinary and the enormous into the same block, the same view. The ferry horn sounds behind me, heading for Miyajima again. Someone else's first morning.

Rooms at the Grand Prince start around US$ 75 per night for a standard double with sea view, and the high-speed ferry to Miyajima runs US$ 11 one way. The Hiroden streetcar — line 1 or 5 to Ujina — costs US$ 1 flat fare and accepts IC cards.