Kusatsu Onsen Hotel Sakurai

Kusatsu's biggest onsen 'hotel' is really a 179-room ryokan: mostly tatami rooms, a 30-metre bath fed by three free-flowing springs, a live-cooking buffet and a nightly yumomi show — but it's big and busy, and the in-room open-air baths aren't onsen

Hotel Sakurai was opened in 1964 by the family behind the Asama Shuzō sake brewery in nearby Naganohara, and grew into Kusatsu's largest hotel: 179 rooms in a six-storey main wing and a 16-storey new wing added in 1995, where every room is a sukiya-style tatami suite. Despite the name, it works like a large Japanese inn — futons, yukata, and dinner as a buffet or a Japanese kaiseki. The draw is the water: a bath about 30 metres long fed by the Bandai-kō and Sainokawara springs, plus a rock open-air bath that adds the milky Wata-no-yu spring, all free-flowing and undiluted, open all night except 10:00–14:00. Every evening staff stage a yumomi water-paddling show that guests can join, followed by taiko drumming. Japanese guests rate it 4.6 across 6,576 reviews on one major booking site and 4.52 across 5,129 on another, with the baths scoring highest. Bloggers who stayed between 2023 and 2025 praised the roomy new-wing suites, the open kitchen grilling steaks and frying tempura, the breakfast French toast, and the kids' chairs and baby soap in the bathhouse. Recent reviews from August to October 2026 love the food and staff but mention crowding at the first buffet run, a hotel that shows its age, air conditioning switched off from October, the Wata-no-yu spring being unavailable in autumn 2026 (told only at check-in), and one guest who found more than ¥30,000 per person too much. The 12 rooms with private open-air baths use heated ordinary water, not onsen. Buffet plans typically cost about ¥21,000–30,000 or more per person with two meals.