Kinokuniya Jinpachi

A 300-year-old pilgrims' inn of six retro tatami rooms where you check in and out at noon and lock either bath for yourself, free — but the spring is heated and recirculated, the tubs are small and most rooms share toilets

Kinokuniya Jinpachi traces some 300 years of history as a lodge for ascetics climbing Mount Ōmine; a bath-guide site says its name was granted by Tokugawa Shigenori, eighth lord of Kii, and the present wooden building went up after Dorogawa's great fire of 1954. Today it's a six-room, deliberately old-fashioned house of tatami rooms from 8 to 50 mats, engawa corridors and paper lanterns, run by an owner whose puns and local tips turn up in review after review. Two things set it apart: check-in and check-out are both at noon, so you can stay up to 24 hours, and both baths — a semi-open garden bath and an indoor bath — can be locked for private use free of charge at any hour except 16:00–19:00, when they alternate by gender. Independent blogs are scarce, so most recent evidence comes from booking-site reviews: Japanese guests rate it 4.3 across 829 reviews on Jalan, with dinner at 4.6 and breakfast at 4.5 but baths and cleanliness at 4.0. They praise spring-water tofu, wild-boar hotpot with no gamey smell, duck hotpot, venison and river fish, and a solo blogger in February 2026 loved watching the snowy garden from the bath. The trade-offs are real: the inn's own page lists the 29°C spring as heated and recirculated; the tubs are small and guests sometimes queue for the newer one; rooms have no bath and most have no toilet (shared toilets can be two floors away, and several were out of order in November 2025); footsteps carry through the old building; and in July 2026 the baths were shut until 16:00 for maintenance. Two-meal stays run about ¥14,000–29,000 per person.