Hotels and ryokan chosen for their onsen and sauna · A paid web magazine · Issue 01
136 of Japan's finest onsen hotels and ryokan.
Choosing a Japanese onsen inn from the other side of a screen is hard. Every inn photographs beautifully, every rating looks alike, and what is real you only learn on arrival. We live inside Japan's onsen: hundreds of baths, one-by-one conversations with inns across the country, and no money taken from any inn. This issue gathers only the stays we would tell a friend to book, from Hokkaido to Kyushu.
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Foreword
Japan’s finest inns are the ones devoted to their onsen.
If you are going to travel all the way to Japan, we don’t want it to end with a soak in an onsen and nothing more.
It may be that you come to Japan only once in your life.
That is why we want you to build into that trip hours you will still be remembering years from now.
Japan has more onsen than anyone could count.
There are hidden onsen that rise deep in the forest, and there are onsen at small mountain inns and at bathhouses in the middle of the city. All of them, of course, are part of Japan’s onsen culture.
But the places we want to show you in this magazine are the ones that make you think, “I would travel here just for this.”
As a magazine devoted entirely to Japan’s onsen and saunas, we have looked into thousands of onsen and inns across the country.
From those we narrowed further, went and stayed and bathed ourselves, and kept for this issue only the inns that made us think, “The whole world should know this place.”
A fine onsen experience is not simply a matter of wonderful water.
What kind of land does the inn stand on?
When you sink into the onsen, what opens up in front of you?
The sound of trees moving? The sound of a river? Birds calling somewhere far off?
The scent of the forest, or of the sea, reaching you through the steam.
The wind on your skin.
When all of it comes together and settles into place, the onsen stops being simply “a bath” and becomes a memory.
And a truly great inn is beautiful in the hours after you climb out of the water, too.
The food of that place, eaten with your body warm and your senses wide open.
The dishes it is served on.
The room you eat it in.
The view from your room.
The quiet running through the building.
The air when you open your eyes in the morning.
Only when all of it connects into one does the experience come: “I am glad I stayed here.”
The inns in this magazine care not only about their onsen and saunas but about every hour of your stay.
As you turn the pages, imagine it.
What would it feel like to sink into this open-air bath?
To see this view with your own eyes?
To wake to morning in this room?
Surely, each time you finish one of them, there will be more places that make you think, “I want to go here too.”
And if, when your trip is over,
“What was the most memorable experience you had in Japan?”
someone asks you that,
we hope the answer that comes to you is the time you spent at an inn you found in this magazine.
So that you can set off the moment you find a place you want to see, the pages link straight to booking sites and let you check the location on Google Maps.
This is not a magazine made only to be looked at.
To learn, to be moved, to decide where to go, and then to book the trip.
We built it so that all of that can happen inside this one issue.
And if this magazine leads you to one of the inns in it, tell us what you felt when you were there.
We hope that journey becomes something that stays with you for a long time to come.
Contents
- Noboribetsu Grand Hotel · Hokkaido
- Kitakobushi Shiretoko Hotel & Resort · Hokkaido
- KIKI Shiretoko Natural Resort · Hokkaido
- Premier Hotel-CABIN-Obihiro · Hokkaido
- La Vista Furano Hills · Hokkaido
- Yuyado Daiichi · Hokkaido
- Lakefront Inn Shikotsuko Marukoma Onsen Ryokan · Hokkaido
- Jozankei Yuraku Soan · Hokkaido
- Hakodate Yunokawa Onsen Hotel Banso · Hokkaido
- Century Marina Hakodate · Hokkaido
- Otaru Granbell Hotel · Hokkaido
- Hotel Taisetsu ONSEN&CANYON RESORT · Hokkaido
- Aonobi Yuyu · Hokkaido
- Akanko Yukononi Tsuruga