Yamashiro Onsen Rurikoh

Yamashiro's big 116-room inn with a nightly taiko show, free round-the-clock lobby drinks, vast 24-hour baths and winter crab kaiseki — but the shared water is recirculated, the baths sit down a long flight of stairs, and the ageing building draws dust and upkeep complaints

Rurikoh is the larger of Yorozuya Kankō's two inns in Yamashiro Onsen, five minutes' walk from its sister Hatori and about ten from the Sōyu and Kosōyu public baths. It marked its 35th anniversary in 2026 and is a 116-room house: about 100 tatami or tatami-and-bed rooms in the Hoshi, Kaze and Tsuki wings plus 14 Western twins and singles, with a theatre club, karaoke, a summer pool and a free Kaga ikkō-ikki taiko show at 21:00 every night. Japanese guests rate it 4.3 across 1,960 reviews on one major site, with dinner and baths at 4.5, and 4.23 across 1,501 on another. Bloggers who stayed between 2022 and 2025 enjoyed the open-air-bath suites, a crab-heavy kaiseki in the semi-private Nisaburō dining room and a breakfast buffet of about 70 dishes where you build your own seafood bowl; 2026 reviewers add free 24-hour lobby drinks, huge high-ceilinged baths open around the clock and frequent room upgrades. Know before you book: a booking site lists the shared baths as water-added, heated and recirculated; only the Hoshi wing's Type A suites have onsen in their outdoor tubs, while the Type B suites' tubs are filled from the tap. The baths are reached by a long flight of stairs that several 2026 guests found hard or impossible with older parents. Complaints from late 2025 to October 2026 also cite dust, a changing-room floor patched with tape, air conditioning that can't be adjusted, thin walls in the singles, a frog in a private bath, a queue at 15:00 check-in and food some found merely average. Standard rooms with two meals cost about ¥19,800–26,000 per person; Hoshi suites run above ¥30,000, and winter crab adds ¥4,400–33,000.