Tsurunoyu Onsen — Hotel in Semboku

This place is truly spectacular! The milky sulphuric water makes your skin super smooth. I bathed in the outdoor womens bath and it was just beautiful with snow surrounding and water temperature just right. There is also an indoors womens bath and that temperature was much warmer. |Our room was clean and although minimal had old world charm. A delicious and plentiful dinner was served in our room. Woke up at 6am to have a private bath and that too was gorgeous. Staff are friendly and some speak enough english which helped as my japanese is very, very basic. Great place for photography! It is secluded and allows you to unwind from the rest of the world. My mistake was carrying with us big luggages, we were a travelling group of 4 x 78cm suitcases and did not think to consider the local bus has no specific storage space for luggage which made it a bit cumbersome, the lovely bus driver improvised and stacked the suitcases on the 2 x front seats. Thankfully no one missed out on a seat. The local bus only takes you half way up the mountain where you meet the free shuttle from Tsurunoyu onsen. Again we had to improvise with our big suitcases and stacked them up the 3 x back rear seats. There is luggage storage at Tazawako station which we saw when we got back next morning, sign indicated 500 yen per luggage. I will do this next time and not be bothered or bother others with big suitcases. Overall, I highly reccommended this place for those looking for beautiful scenery and a good...

This place is truly spectacular! The milky sulphuric water makes your skin super smooth. I bathed in the outdoor womens bath and it was just beautiful with snow surrounding and water temperature just right. There is also an indoors womens bath and that temperature was much warmer. |Our room was clean and although minimal had old world charm. A delicious and plentiful dinner was served in our room. Woke up at 6am to have a private bath and that too was gorgeous. Staff are friendly and some speak enough english which helped as my japanese is very, very basic. Great place for photography! It is secluded and allows you to unwind from the rest of the world. My mistake was carrying with us big luggages, we were a travelling group of 4 x 78cm suitcases and did not think to consider the local bus has no specific storage space for luggage which made it a bit cumbersome, the lovely bus driver improvised and stacked the suitcases on the 2 x front seats. Thankfully no one missed out on a seat. The local bus only takes you half way up the mountain where you meet the free shuttle from Tsurunoyu onsen. Again we had to improvise with our big suitcases and stacked them up the 3 x back rear seats. There is luggage storage at Tazawako station which we saw when we got back next morning, sign indicated 500 yen per luggage. I will do this next time and not be bothered or bother others with big suitcases. Overall, I highly reccommended this place for those looking for beautiful scenery and a good...

Onsen was absolutely amazing.

We managed to book Honjin, it's interesting for sure unfortunately there was an explosive amount of stink bugs (small ones, fortunately) and we had to keep scoping them out. We must have got over 50 of those in one night. It's an issue all over Japan and we chose to book a more historical room in the middle of a mountain, so it's just unfortunate for us. :( People that are not fans of bugs should be aware and maybe book other rooms.

The openair bath for ladies was really nice and we spent most of our time there because we didn't want to stay in the room because of the bugs. Surprisingly not many people were there so for most of the time, we were the only two people using the bath. A lady told us the mixed bath was not hot enough so we didn't bother to try the mixed bath.

By the way despite the official website still says that you should call the ryokan to arrange shuttle bus when you arrive at the Tazawako station, there is no need to do so. The shuttle bus runs regularly according to the schedule of the bus running from Tazawako station. I called and the lady picking up the phone was quite confused why I was calling. People should really avoid taking their bulky luggage with them though because the shuttle bus has no space for it, and it's really difficult to move your huge luggage...