Zao Onsen Kinosato

A warm, family-run 20-room inn at the edge of Zao Onsen, loved for its staff and hearty Yamagata-beef dinners, with a milky, free-flowing sulfur bath in a wooden bath house across the car park — the indoor baths aren't hot-spring water, and the 1993 building shows its age

Kinosato opened in 1993 on the quiet, dead-end lower edge of Zao Onsen, beside the Shiginoyachi marsh where skunk cabbage blooms in spring, and a 5-minute walk from the Zao Ropeway and the Yokokura slope. It's a small house of 20 rooms, run by an okami who greets guests with homemade oshiruko (sweet red-bean soup) and tea in the lobby. The draw is the bath: Daikichi-no-yu, a hinoki semi-open-air bath in a separate wooden bath house about 30 m across the car park, filled with Zao's milky, strongly acidic sulfur water, free-flowing with no water or heat added. The indoor baths, by contrast, are heated Zao groundwater, not hot-spring water. Japanese guests rate it 4.7 across 690 reviews on one major site (dinner 4.8) and 4.65 across 449 on another, and 4.77 across 22 on a third. Reviewers in 2025–2026 praise the attentive staff — leftovers made into rice balls, lost hats posted home — and generous dinners built around Yamagata beef sukiyaki or shabu-shabu and the inn's sobagaki hotpot, and many found the annex bath empty. Complaints: walking outside to the bath (boots and blankets are lent in winter), water that some found too hot, worn rooms with frayed tatami and thin walls (May and August 2026), and one August 2026 guest who found the food bland; dinner is served in a shared dining room, not in private rooms. Two-meal stays run about ¥18,000–30,000 per person.