Yugawara Onsen Gensen Uenoya

Yugawara's oldest inn: three registered-heritage wooden buildings, its own 82°C spring poured unrecirculated into every bath and two free private open-air tubs — but no lift, steep stairs, thin walls and modest dinners

Uenoya says it has taken guests since the Edo period — over 300 years — and calls itself the oldest inn in Yugawara. Its three wooden buildings, the 1923 annex, the four-storey 1930 main house and the 1930s entrance hall, were registered as national tangible cultural properties in 2010. Guests compare the maze of polished keyaki corridors and camphor-wood stairs to Spirited Away. The real draw is the water: the inn's own well, 300 m deep, gives a sodium-calcium chloride-sulfate spring at about 82°C, and every bath, including the in-room baths, gets it straight from the well. There is no recirculation or chlorine; the inn brings it down to about 42°C by blending in cooled spring water, adding a little cold water where needed. Japanese guests rate it 4.7 across 750 reviews on one major site (baths 4.8) and 4.61 across 405 on another. Bloggers who stayed in 2022 and 2023, and a bank's onsen column in 2024, praise the two free private open-air baths, the hinoki foot bath on the roof and the easygoing family service. Know before you book: there is no lift and the stairs are steep, sound carries through the wooden walls, only three or four rooms have their own bath and five have no toilet, and dinners are deliberately small. In 2026 one guest called the food ready-made and the building musty, and another found the rice cold. Card payment is limited, so bring cash. Most 2026 guests paid about ¥19,000–25,000 per person with two meals, and ¥30,000+ for a room with its own bath.