Sagae Onsen Hotel Symphony Main Building

Hotel Symphony sits three minutes on foot from Sagae station, with an indoor bath, a rotenburo, and a rose-petal bath, all drawing on Sagae's local onsen, first tapped in 1945. The water runs brown-tinted and smooth on the skin, the kind of spring long nicknamed bijin-no-yu (美人の湯), "beauty-skin water." There's no sauna or cold plunge here. The hotel has kept up its baths and a sukiyaki restaurant, Sanmitei (三味亭), for half a century, in a spa town that sits roughly in the middle of Yamagata prefecture.