Originally Posted by
Steve M
I think you've covered it. If you want a guarantee that your room will be ready at 7am, the only way to do this at most hotels is to pay for the previous night. There may be some hotels that have 24-hour plans, and others that have a day rate, but those are few and far between.
Most hotels will let you check in that early if a room is available, but Japan of course will have notable exceptions. I've been denied early check-in in Osaka at noon because "check-in doesn't start until 3pm." It's just part of the mentality.
One time I was staying at a ryokan and I asked if we could check out just 30min late. They said that's no problem. When we checked out, I saw that they'd tacked on 3000yen additional for all of 30min. They're very polite about it, but we could tell they weren't going to budge. We just paid without arguing. And in Japan, you generally don't want to create a scene for anything like this. So Japanese hotels are indeed very inflexible. Perhaps a few exceptions to this are foreign-chain hotels that cater a lot to foreign guests.