Shirakabe

Shirakabe sits along the Kano River in Yugashima (湯ヶ島), a hot spring area in the Izu mountains that the novelist Kawabata Yasunari (川端康成) once called the finest mountain spa he knew. The water flows fresh without recirculation across all baths, including the in-room outdoor tubs. The two signature outdoor baths are genuinely unusual: one is hollowed from a single lava boulder weighing over 50 tons, the other carved from a tree more than 1,200 years old. A large indoor bath with semi-outdoor access has walls of ancient tuff stone from the old seabed. Some rooms on the upper floor have private reserved baths. The ryokan has been a gathering place for writers and artists since it opened in the mid-20th century.