Chikurinan Mizuno

Fourteen rooms, each with its own free-flowing open-air bath facing Hatsushima, six free private baths, horses in the garden and a famous whole fried scorpionfish — at the top of a very steep road, with no lift and no large bath

Chikurinan Mizuno sits high on a slope above the fishing port of Ajiro, looking across Sagami Bay to Hatsushima and Ōshima. It's small — 14 rooms in a 1978 main building renovated in 2014 and a three-suite annex built in 2013 from old farmhouse timbers brought from snowy Niigata — and its draw is the water: every room has an ocean-view open-air bath, and all 21 baths, including six free private baths, run on the inn's own salty calcium-sodium chloride spring, which the inn describes as 100% free-flowing. It comes out so hot (about 63–70°C) that guests add cold water themselves; it's brownish, cloudy and very salty. There's no large public bath. Dinner and breakfast are served in your room, built around the signature yume-kasago — a whole scorpionfish fried and dressed with a black-vinegar, ginseng and royal-jelly sauce — with a choice of wagyu, abalone or spiny lobster to finish. Japanese guests rate it 4.7 across 718 reviews on one major site and 4.71 across 88 on another, with service and baths at 4.8. Complaints in 2025–2026 are mostly practical: a steep, winding access road, no lift and plenty of stairs, 40-minute private-bath slots, a scorpionfish some found too hard to eat, portions too big for older guests, and the open-air private bath Tenkū closed in winter since one of the two sources lost flow in 2024.