Suizantei Club Jozankei

Suizantei Club Jozankei is a fifteen-room inn on a wooded slope in Jozankei, the hot spring town in the hills above Sapporo. Its four floors stand for the four seasons, and each room is named after a traditional Japanese sweet. Rooms run from 56 to 110 square metres and every one has its own hot spring bath. Only one category, of four rooms, has an outdoor tub; four other rooms add a private sauna.

The water is a sodium chloride spring, blended from three sources the operator owns in the Toyohira riverbed and averaging about 69°C at the source. The inn says each room’s tub draws through a valve straight off the source, unheated and undiluted. The shared bathhouse has an open-air pool of Sapporo soft stone, a marble indoor bath and a sauna, open 15:00–03:00 and again from 05:00, men’s and women’s sides swapping after the morning clean. There is no reservable private bath.

Dinner is in one of two rooms: a kaiseki dining room cooking Hokkaido seafood and vegetables from the group’s Jozankei garden with French technique, or a grill room serving teppanyaki. Breakfast is in the kaiseki room, and meals are not served in guest rooms. The second-floor lounge pours herb teas, seasonal drinks and evening cocktails at no charge.

Check-in is 15:00, check-out 11:00; guests must be 13 or older. The building is on a slope with many stairs. A free shuttle from central Sapporo must be booked by 19:00 the previous day.