Takayamaso Hanano

Takayamaso Hanano has stood on the hillside above the Arima hot spring town, in Kobe’s Kita ward, since 1956. It keeps 15 rooms: nine Japanese-style, one Western, and five suites of 65 to 100 sq m added since 2022. Corridors carry the owner’s art and antiques and nageire wild-flower arrangements in the tea-flower tradition.

Arima has two waters; the inn draws both. In the communal bath, Hoshi no Yu, the indoor tub holds the gold spring, an iron-bearing sodium chloride brine, and the open-air tub the silver spring, a weak radioactive radon water. Neither can be booked privately. Hours are 15:00–24:00 and 06:00–10:00, with a half-hour cleaning break at 19:00. The inn’s listings call the water 100 per cent spring, heated and not free-flowing; the Japan Spa Association’s entry, stale on other counts, says free-flowing. Every suite has its own hot spring bath, the two top-floor ones a gold and a silver each. Tattoos are not permitted.

Dinner is a ten-course seasonal kaiseki of local vegetables, 18,700 yen a head or 29,700 yen with Kobe beef steak, served in the eight-table dining room or a private one. Breakfast centres on yuba lifted from fresh soy milk.

No one aged 12 or under is admitted, infants included. Check-in is 15:00–18:00, check-out by 11:00, and bathing tax is 150 yen per adult. Arima-Onsen station is ten minutes’ walk; phone on arrival, 14:30 to 18:00, for a free pickup. About twenty stone steps lead to the entrance, twenty more down to the bath.