Yamashiro Onsen Hatori

A mid-priced, 67-room town-centre inn with free all-night drinks, weekend taiko drumming, real single rooms for solo travellers and a gentle ginger-and-koji kaiseki — but the 'open-air bath' suites use tap water, not onsen, and the building shows its age

Hatori stands halfway along Yamashiro Onsen's main street, a five-minute walk from the Sōyu and the restored Meiji-era Kosōyu public baths. Run by Yorozuya Kankō, which also owns the sister inn Rurikō down the road (free bathing there for Hatori guests), it is a 67-room house built around a theme of 'the warmth of wood, the gentleness of leaves': fresh flowers and ink paintings everywhere, tatami rooms (some with beds), a free self-service lounge with drinks and snacks from 15:00 through the night, free table tennis, karaoke and a Kaga ikkō-ikki taiko show on Friday to Sunday nights. Japanese guests rate it 4.37 across 1,000 reviews on one major site, with dinner the top score at 4.55, and 4.21 across 33 on another. Bloggers who stayed in 2023 and 2025 praised the hinoki bath, the private-room kaiseki and the eight single rooms — one 2025 blogger chose it after once failing to find any Kaga inn that would take a solo guest. Know before you book: the spring is Yamashiro's alkaline simple water piped from the town supply and not free-flowing, and the six suites' outdoor tubs are filled from the tap — the inn's own room page says they are not onsen. The complaints from 2025–2026 are consistent: worn or dirty suite tubs, an ageing building with thin walls, mould in air conditioners, the odd insect, hot shared baths, and front-desk and dinner explanations that were rushed or hard to follow. A standard room with the basic kaiseki costs about ¥50,800–53,200 for two; winter crab adds ¥4,400–33,000 per person.