Yudanaka Onsen Yorozuya

A plain concrete inn wrapped around one of Japan's great bathhouses — the temple-like 1950s Momoyama-buro, a registered cultural property — with good beef and soba, but tired rooms and a busy dining floor

Yorozuya traces itself to the 1790s, but you come for one room: the Momoyama-buro, a temple-style wooden bathhouse built in the early 1950s with a coffered ceiling, an oval tub and a garden open-air bath beyond, registered as a tangible cultural property in 2003. Almost every blogger calls it the reason to stay, especially at night from the garden bath. The rest of the inn is an eight-storey concrete building, and in 2026 the inn itself admitted that everything except the Momoyama bath dates from the late Showa era. The old wooden Shoraiso wing burned down in February 2021 — the main building and the Momoyama bath survived — and Shoraiso has since reopened as a separate five-room luxury inn across the street; Yorozuya's own room pages still describe the old wing, so ignore them. Guests rate it 4.61 across about 1,200 reviews on one major site and 4.6 on another, with the bath the top category everywhere. Dinner of apple-fed Shinshu beef, hand-made soba and local sake is well liked, and breakfast in tiered boxes with an illustrated handwritten menu wins fans. The complaints are about the building: dated rooms with small, dark room baths, dining 'private rooms' with open tops so you hear the next table, cooking smells drifting up the stairwell, and a Momoyama bath that is cold in mid-winter. Two-meal stays run from about ¥43,000 for two.