Ito Onsen Yokikan

A 1910 hillside inn where a tiny in-house cable car climbs 45 degrees to a free-flowing open-air bath over Itō, with both meals in your room — but the building is old and full of stairs, it shuts every Tuesday and Wednesday, and the view only appears when you stand up

Yokikan has stood on the slope above Itō since 1910, and its signature is unusual even by Japanese standards: an open-air funicular, the 'mountain railway', which rattles 30 metres up a 45-degree incline from the lobby to the upper-level annex rooms and the open-air bath. The inn owns two springs — a hot calcium-sodium chloride spring for the open-air bath and annex room baths, and a mild simple spring for the two indoor baths — and states that both are free-flowing with no heating or added water. There are 19 Japanese rooms; every upper-level annex (hanare) room has its own onsen bath, as do some main-building rooms. Most recent evidence comes from booking-site reviews rather than blogs: Japanese guests rate it 4.3 across 829 reviews on one major site (baths 4.8, but rooms 4.1 and cleanliness 4.0) and 4.36 across 675 on another. Two blogs, from Golden Week 2022 and February 2024, loved the free-flowing room bath, empty baths and in-room dinners. Reviewers in 2025–2026 praise warm, unfussy staff, generous meals of local horse mackerel, kinmedai and sashimi served in your room, and a lift to the station in the morning. The complaints are consistent: an old building with many stairs, futons cleared around 7:00 before breakfast, every dish set down at once so hot food cools, a hedge that hides the view unless you stand, and in 2025–2026 an unusable room bath, a broken tap and a guest hurried out of the indoor bath at changeover. Two-meal stays run about ¥19,000–30,000+ per person.