Noboribetsu Onsen Kashoutei Hanaya

A 21-room inn in a town of big hotels: milky free-flowing sulphur water, both meals served in your room and free draft beer and sake all stay — but the baths are tiny, the walls thin and the building showing its age

Kashoutei Hanaya bills itself as the smallest inn in Noboribetsu, a town otherwise lined with large hotels: 21 rooms on four floors at the quiet lower end of the resort, beside the cloudy Kusurisanbetsu river. Two things set it apart. The baths take the acidic sulphur water piped from Jigokudani, about a kilometre away, and the inn calls it 100% free-flowing — rare in Noboribetsu — though a 2022 blogger was told it is watered down in summer. And both dinner and breakfast are served in your room. Since the inn went 'drink-inclusive', draft Sapporo Classic, highballs, sake, Noboribetsu milk and soft drinks in the lobby are free throughout the stay and can be carried to the room. Japanese guests rate it 4.8 across 62 reviews on one major site (dinner and service both 4.8) and 4.68 across 31 on another, where food scores 4.93. Bloggers from 2022 to 2026 praise the seasonal kaiseki — Shiraoi beef seared sushi, sukiyaki and hot-plate beef, sea-bream boat platters, rice cooked in an iron pot — the free minibar and Noboribetsu pudding on the renovated top floor, and staff who photograph birthday and 88th-birthday celebrations and frame the prints. The catch is the scale: the indoor and outdoor baths each hold about three people, with four washing stations, and 2026 reviewers mention thin walls and noisy neighbours, an ageing building, low tables that are hard on older knees, a narrow, hard-to-find car park and, in one August 2026 review, large insects in the outdoor bath. Two-meal plans start at ¥24,500 per person; a 2026 blogger paid ¥39,100 per person for a room with its own onsen bath.