Fujisan Ryokan

A zelkova-wood inn beloved of Miyazawa Kenji, with a hand-dug rock bath 1.25 metres deep where you stand in water rising straight from the floor — superb free-flowing water, rustic rooms, and a self-catering tōji wing that divides opinion

Fujisan Ryokan has stood alone at Namari since a public bathhouse was built in 1786, and legend says the spring was found when a woodcutter saw a white monkey healing its wounds at the foot of a katsura tree. The three-storey main building of 1941 is built entirely of zelkova; the poet Miyazawa Kenji, a distant relative, visited often, and the inn appears in the film Our Little Sister. The draw is the Shirasaru-no-yu, a two-storey-high hall where you stand in a hand-dug rock tub about 1.25 metres deep as water bubbles up from the bottom — mixed, with women-only hours. All four bathhouses use alkaline water at 57°C from five sources, 100% free-flowing with no heating, added water or recirculation. Japanese guests rate it 4.45 across 2,555 reviews on one major site and 4.2 across 3,011 on another, with baths scoring highest and rooms and cleanliness lowest. The inn has two halves: the Ryokan wing, with generous dinners in semi-private booths (Iwate wagyu, Hanamaki pork, excellent rice) and old wooden rooms without private toilets; and the Tōji wing for traditional hot-spring cures, with shared toilets, a self-catering kitchen, no air conditioning and rooms you make up yourself — loved by fans of 'shabby' charm, panned by others for dirt, cobwebs and torn fusuma. Ryokan-wing stays with two meals run about ¥15,000–27,000 per person in 2026; the Tōji wing about ¥8,000–14,000.