Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan
C · 6.1 / 10situational
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is a 37-room hot-spring inn in the Yamanashi mountains, founded in 705 AD and run by 52 generations of one family, and KI-NRT went out of his way to visit for that history. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest hotel in the world. The onsen was sublime and the top suite impressed him, but a typhoon erased the old buildings decades ago and maglev-tunnel construction dusts up the approach, and he closes by naming smaller, more polished, better-located ryokans he would pick first. The record and the water justify the detour, and the surroundings add nothing.
Scores
Food 3.5 / 5
Meals come to your room only if you book one of the handful of special suites such as Kitadake, which KI-NRT enjoyed, and the food itself exceeded his expectations. He calls it good, and he notes that many smaller, more intimate ryokans offer great food as well.
Bath 4.5 / 5
The water is natural hot spring, free-flowing into the open-air bath of the Kitadake suite and into quite a few public baths on site, a scale only a handful of much smaller luxury ryokans can match, and KI-NRT found both the in-room and the communal baths sublime, wonderful even by Japan's high standards. The one drawback is the showers, since the public baths have none and the suite's own shower is outdoors.
Service
The same family has run the inn for 52 generations. KI-NRT says little about the current staff beyond a room attendant who explained the maglev works in the valley, and when he lists what many smaller ryokans do better, more polished service is on the list.
Room 3.5 / 5
Book the special room Kitadake if you go, a top-floor corner suite with its own free-flowing open-air onsen that had KI-NRT giddy before he arrived and proved plenty spacious once he did, and one of the few rooms where meals are served in the suite. The building around it is a single large block of 37 rooms put up in 1997 with zero historic charm, which he calls bland, and the in-room shower is oddly outdoors, though the wifi is fast.
Place 2.5 / 5
Keiunkan sits deep in the Hayakawa mountains of Yamanashi, an area KI-NRT found super remote but not uniquely beautiful, with nothing to see or do within a 30-minute drive (Minobusan's temple, half an hour away, is not a must-do). The road in follows a dusty river lined with quarries and gravel trucks, and road works for the maglev tunnel continue until at least 2027. A typhoon destroyed the original inn, a few miles downriver, some 60 years ago.
Getting there
- Tokyo — ~3h05, 1 transfer (estimated). Azusa LEX Shinjuku->Kofu ~1h30, then ~1.5h by car into the Hayakawa valley.
- Kofu — ~1h35, 0 transfers (estimated). ~1.5h by car from Kofu to the remote Hayakawa mountain site.