Okada Ryokan & Warakutei (Hirayu Onsen)

A big, century-old Hirayu inn by the bus terminal with free-flowing sulphur baths, an iron-pot open-air tub and generous Hida beef dinners — cheap in the main building, private open-air baths in the ten-room Warakutei annex, but the water can run too hot and upkeep is patchy

Okada Ryokan opened in 1921 in Hirayu, the oldest spa village in Okuhida, and today it's two inns on one site: a 60-room main building of plain tatami rooms, and Warakutei, a ten-room annex built from a 150-year-old farmhouse moved from Gujō Hachiman, where every room has its own free-flowing indoor and open-air bath. The water is the inn's own sulphur-tinged sodium chloride and bicarbonate spring, 1,200 litres a minute from four wells at 96°C, poured straight into the baths. The shared bathhouse is the draw: a high-ceilinged koyamaki-wood hall reached by tatami stairs (or a lift) from a changing room upstairs, a rock garden pool and a ~37°C iron-pot tub facing Mt Akandana. Japanese guests rate it 4.4 across 1,242 reviews on one major site (baths 4.5) and 3.97 across 634 on another (dinner 4.08, facilities 3.77). Bloggers from 2022 to 2026 found it old but clean, the dinners too big to finish and the baths almost empty midweek; a 2026 bus-tour guest who expected little was won over. Reviewers praise the Hida beef, kind dining staff, care for babies and the free parking for Kamikōchi trips. The complaints in 2026: baths too hot to enter (in June a broken cooling pipe left everything scalding), slime and moss in an outdoor tub, insects and rotting wood around Warakutei's room baths in spring and summer, a cool front desk, a sewer smell from one toilet fan, tough beef and slow, lukewarm service. Two-meal stays run about ¥12,000–17,000 per person in the main building and ¥19,000–30,000 in Warakutei.