Kusatsu Onsen Hotel Ichii

The closest hotel to Kusatsu's Yubatake, with two free-flowing springs and a much-praised live-kitchen buffet — but only 23 rooms see the hot-spring field, most rooms are dated, and it's a big, busy house with long corridors

Hotel Ichii traces its founding to the Edo period, more than 300 years ago, and calls itself the hotel closest to the Yubatake: its main building stands right across the street from Kusatsu's steaming hot-spring field, with a big souvenir shop on the ground floor. It's a large, three-building hotel, and only 23 rooms look onto the Yubatake — 20 ten-tatami Japanese rooms and three executive rooms on the eighth floor, renovated in March 2024. The baths, in the annex, are the main draw: the inn draws on two of Kusatsu's six main sources — the milky Shirahata spring for the indoor bath, which was renovated in 2021 with three tubs at different temperatures, and the clear, highly acidic Bandai spring for the open-air bath — both free-flowing. Since October 2024 most guests eat at Tōun, a buffet with a live kitchen serving Jōshū beef steak, roast beef and made-to-order sushi; a teppanyaki course in a Taishō-romance dining room is the alternative. Japanese guests rate it 4.7 across 4,424 reviews on one major site (dinner 4.8, rooms 4.1) and 4.63 across 3,276 on another. Reviewers in 2025–2026 praise the location, the buffet, the three-temperature baths and attentive staff. The recurring complaints: dated rooms with air conditioning you can barely adjust, a 3–4 minute walk with two lifts from the main building to the baths, an open-air bath walled in by screens, a 90-minute dinner and 60-minute breakfast limit, and waits for valet-parked cars. Two-meal stays start at about ¥39,600 for two; most 2026 reviewers on one site paid ¥19,000–26,000 per person.