Colors of Four Seasons HATAGO

A six-room inn above Arima Onsen, opened in 2002 by owner-chef Tadamichi Ota, reopened in March 2023 after a year’s renovation. No two rooms are furnished alike and all are large, 60 to 90 sq m. Room drinks and snacks, all local to Kobe and Hyogo, are free.

Every room has its own open-air bath fed with kinsen, Arima’s brown iron-and-salt water, drawn from the Gokuraku source — 94°C from 240 m down, an iron- and sodium-bearing strong saline chloride spring. The inn is plain about the limits: the baths are not free-flowing, and the indoor bath that five of the six rooms also have is not spring water. Room 302, Sogetsu, has the open-air bath and a shower only. There is no communal bath, left out deliberately. The room baths can be used at any hour.

Both meals are served at a ten-seat counter screened into bays one party wide, where the cooks work and explain each dish an arm’s length away — kyakumae ryori, the house’s term for cooking in front of the guest. Dinner is a seasonal kaiseki, one course bringing Kobe beef in a hotpot under cotton-candy clouds. Breakfast is Japanese with Western touches, the rolled omelette made at the counter.

Check-in 15:00, check-out 11:00 — though the inn’s pages and its booking listings give different last-arrival times, so confirm a late arrival. Guests aged 12 and under are not accepted. Free pickup from Arima Onsen station, the bus stops and the ropeway; call on arrival.