Yachi Onsen

Yachi claims more than 400 years of bathing and calls itself one of Japan's three great hidden hot springs. Each side has two pools. The upper bath is milky at 42°C, and the lower bath wells up clear and sulphurous through the floor at 38°C, cool enough to sit in for a long time. Day visitors pay ¥800.

The rooms are Showa-era Japanese rooms for one to six people with toilets and basins down the hall, and the inn warns that footsteps and voices carry through the old timber. The East Wing's Genji room is where the novelist and nun Setouchi Jakucho wrote the ninth volume of her Tale of Genji translation. Dinner leans on char, grilled, raw or fried, with local mountain vegetables.

Winter here means about five metres of snow, and martens come to the window of the Bunashizuku dining room. In winter Route 103 is closed between the Sukayu and Yachi gates, so the Hakkoda Ropeway sits on the far side of the pass. Come for the bath and the quiet, and ski from Sukayu or Jogakura.