My Favorite Place: Onsen Hotels

A friend from Italy came to our prefecture for a visit, so I took him to one of my favorite places in Japan, an onsen hotel in the small mountain town of Ikaho. While most any volcanic hot spring is a joy to bathe in, I’m a big fan of the larger onsen hotel experience, where you can roam the hallways in your yukata sampling several different baths, then do fun stuff like karaoke or table tennis. Japan can be a strangely uniform place, and features you can find at one hot spring hotel will usually be available almost everywhere. For example, I guarantee you’ll find a vending machine selling Haagan-Dazs ice cream and a little shop inside the hotel that sells ramen to guests who get hungry late at night. Also, there’s always a “game corner” where you can play video games, but for some reason they’re always games from 10-15 years ago. The inn we chose is quite a famous one, having been operated by the founding family for the last 420 years — wow. One thing I like about the dating-sim games we sell is the cultural tidbits you can get from them, and our game Tokimeki Check in! is filled with fun references to these hot springs inns, if you’re curious to learn more about them.

The hot springs inn I went to was founded in 1576. Yes, I was amazed by that, too.