Kinugawa Onsen Asaya Hotel

Kinugawa's big showpiece inn, founded in 1888: a soaring lobby atrium with glass lifts and a pipe organ, a 13th-floor open-air bath and a 100-dish buffet, with an onsen tub in every room — but the spring is heated and recirculated, the buffet gets crowded, and valley-side rooms look out on derelict hotels

Asaya was founded in 1888 and is now one of Kinugawa Onsen's largest inns: 192 rooms in two wings, Shūhōkan and Hachibankan, 142 of them Japanese or Japanese-Western rooms with tatami. The draw is spectacle and abundance — a vast lobby atrium with glass lifts and a pipe organ, a 13th-floor open-air bath about 80 m above the river, two more large baths, four bookable private baths, and a dinner buffet of around 100 Japanese, Western and Chinese dishes with crab, steak and all-you-can-eat Häagen-Dazs. Every room has a bath fed from the inn's own alkaline spring, and an online onsen award the inn cites has named it the 'yokozuna' of eastern Japan seven years running. Japanese guests rate it 4.7 across 8,387 reviews on one major site (rooms lowest at 4.4), 4.62 across 5,594 on another and 4.64 across 603 on a third. Bloggers who stayed in 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026 — two of them on a third visit — loved the atrium, the rooftop bath and the buffet, and families praise the kids' room and loan items. The catches: the spring is 37°C at source and listed on one booking site as diluted, heated and recirculated; the inn marks most of its in-room view baths as recirculated, and two reviewers smelled chlorine. The buffet gets crowded — a May 2026 guest's food went cold in the queue — and salmon roe was dropped from breakfast at the end of January 2026. Reviewers in 2025–2026 also mention musty rooms, worn mattresses, a smelly yukata, a brisk 'efficiency-first' check-in and views of abandoned hotels from the valley side. Two-meal stays mostly run about ¥19,000–30,000+ per person.