Nukumori no Yado Furukawa

Furukawa sits in the Jozankei hot-spring village, 50 minutes by car from central Sapporo; the Jotetsu bus from Sapporo Station takes about 80 minutes and stops outside. There are 55 rooms, from plain twelve-mat tatami rooms up to a special seventh- and eighth-floor wing whose suites have hot-spring baths of their own, two of them reached by a spiral stair to a rooftop tub.

The water is a sodium chloride spring. A three-storey bath house holds three large baths, each with an outdoor pool and a high-concentration hydrogen bath, plus steam rooms fed by vapour drawn off an 80°C source. The basement bath was built from 150-year-old Otaru soft stone and salvaged timber to recreate the bath tended by Miizumi Jozan, who opened the Jozankei spring in 1866; the inn says not a drop of water is added and the spring rises through the floor of the tub. It costs 500 yen, waived for guests on the special floor and in some rooms, and opens 15:00–23:00; children are asked not to use it. Private cypress baths on the fifth and sixth floors are 2,200 yen per room for 50 minutes and must be booked.

Dinner is a washoku kaiseki, served in a hearth-side dining room or, for special-floor guests, in private rooms built from a relocated Kyushu farmhouse and an Otaru stone warehouse. Breakfast is a country-style Japanese buffet.

Check-in is from 15:00, last arrival 19:00. A free shuttle leaves central Sapporo at 14:30 by prior booking; dogs cannot ride it. Four rooms take dogs up to large size, two with a hot-spring bath in the room.