Yamashiro Onsen Yuzankaku

A 1950s Yamashiro landmark reborn as a budget all-inclusive: free drinks and oden from check-in, a crab-leg and sweet-shrimp buffet with free-flowing Ishikawa sake, and a kids' paradise — but the building is worn, the baths keep breaking down and the crab is often thin

Yuzankaku is a big Shōwa-era inn in Yamashiro Onsen — the inn itself says the building dates from 1952 — now run by the BBH Hotel Group (Breezbay), which has turned it into an all-inclusive family and group house. A gold phoenix greets you in the lobby, a floodlit waterfall fills the garden window, and from 15:00 to 18:00 beer, sours, highballs, soft drinks, snacks and oden are free; a night bar and liqueur-topped ice cream followed in August 2026. Dinner is a 90-minute buffet in Rokumeitei with all-you-can-eat red snow-crab legs and sweet shrimp on most plans, an Ishikawa sake tasting, and a Nepali-Indian curry corner. Most recent evidence comes from booking-site reviews rather than blogs: Japanese guests rate it 3.8 across 654 reviews on Jalan (dinner and service 4.0, baths and cleanliness 3.5) and 3.75 across 724 on Rakuten Travel (facilities 3.48). A blogger who stayed twice in early 2025 loved the lounge, the lit-up waterfall and the seafood-bowl breakfast. Repeat guests in 2026 call it unbeatable value — free karaoke, table tennis, 4,000 manga, a big kids' room and a summer rooftop pool. The complaints are just as consistent: mouldy, musty corridors, closed toilets, cold rooms in winter, crab legs with little meat (September 2026), a thin buffet, hair-strewn changing rooms, and baths repeatedly out of action — frozen in February 2026, the Greek-temple bath shut until mid-July and the open-air bath until 10 September 2026. Plans with two meals and drinks ran from about ¥8,000 to over ¥30,000 per person in 2026, most often ¥10,000–22,000.