Kutsurogijuku Shintaki

A big, well-run riverside inn with four truly free-flowing baths — including the Aizu lords' rock bath fed from the bedrock beneath it — free sake in the lounge and Aizu-style dinners at a fair price; it's busy, dim and full of stairs, and private baths cost extra

Shintaki is one of two inns run by Kutsurogijuku, a company that relaunched old Higashiyama inns in 2005; its annex was once a separate inn, Fudōtaki. Its pride is Sennen-no-yu, a natural rock bath built over spring-fed bedrock that the inn says was once the bath of the Aizu domain lords, plus Saru-no-yu, named for the legend that Hijikata Toshizō soaked here during the Boshin War; the painter Takehisa Yumeji stayed three times between 1911 and 1930. The inn states that every bath is free-flowing, with no added water, heating, recirculation or filtration — rare for a house of about 90 rooms — and bathing bloggers in 2023–2024 rated the water excellent. Japanese guests score it 4.7 across 6,893 reviews on one major site (baths 4.8) and 4.65 across 2,467 on another. They praise the renovated river-view twin rooms, a free lounge with coffee, soup, amazake and local sake until 22:00, a creative Aizu dinner of horse sashimi, yuba and kozuyu that changes on a second night, and an 11:00 check-out. The catches: it's a large, lively inn with dim corridors, steep steps down to Sennen-no-yu and only one lift in some wings; private-bath slots cost ¥1,500, and nobody can bathe between about 0:15 and 5:15. In 2024–2026 guests also reported a distant overflow car park, a billing error and a wrong room number, a curt front desk, a bath tax payable only in cash at check-out, and a room smelling of tobacco. Two-meal stays in 2026 mostly cost ¥16,000–23,000 per person; the onsen rooms run over ¥30,000.