Location Female outdoor bath was great as it’s facing the bamboo forest (go there early in the morning and you will the the only person there) Private baths are extensive! They have a lot of large family baths facing bamboo forest, which is great.

It’s a large ryokan, sometimes it was hard to get attention of the staff. Kaizeku in this place wasn’t great, it was a lot of food for the dinner, but only beef was tasty, the rest it seemed was squeezed in to make up the number of the dishes to make it a kaizeki. And no it’s not the matter of taste, some dishes were unseasoned and tasteless. Again it’s a big place, so they probably loose on quality and ramp up quantity to accommodate to the turnaround of people. Ryokan itself has seen better days and even though it’s claiming to be 4 star I would hardly give them 3.

Everything. Incredibly attentive and helpful staff. Ome of the best meals I have ever eaten for dinner. Very comfortable sleep. 10 private baths and so almost never have to wait for them. The small details everywhere are just perfect. It is very expensive but also fantastic and when you factor in the cost of the two meals it is not too bad at all. Great traditional ryokan experience.

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The Fumiko Ryokan is a very private onsen inn located at the basin of the Kurakawa valley. I love the tranquillity, privacy, and proximity to natural landscape at Fumiko Ryokan. Throughout the stay, we rarely ran into fellow guests staying in any of the onsen pools offers, which means they do a good job in crowd control. We were able to fully recharge in a peaceful, quiet, undisturbed environment during our stay at Fumiko Ryokan. I highly recommend this place and will definitely visit again.

The hotel check-in time (3PM local time) is too late, and check-out time (10AM) is a bit too early. I would suggest they shorten the house-keeping time in between, so check-in time starts at 1:30PM. This is because the earliest bus to Kurokawa arrives at 1PM. Since the valley is tiny, it's very difficult for tourists to wander around to pass 2 hours waiting for check-in.

View from our room of the river was spectacular and the service was impeccable, the onsens were also amazing with great variety and of course really relaxing. Really couldn't have asked for more in an onsen vacation! Food was good and served in our room, plus we didn't get to go but they are affiliated with an Annex onsen a few minutes walk away that looked really good from the pictures!

Nothing :)

plenty of onsen facilities and great meals

bed is less comfortable than i thaught

Everything was top notch! staff were fantastic, the onsen choice was plentiful and so relaxing, the dinner/breakfast sittings were amazing, all set within a tiny onsen town.

Nothing.

Great ryokan experience in a traditional small onsen town. Good availability of onsens both private and public, but even had public onsens to myself as a private onsen. I can highly recommend the outdoor onsens. Also makes a good base to visit Mt Aso for walks.

Very little not to like. If you like onsens this is a great town. The town itself is otherwise small.so if you just want to walk around you will do that in a couple of hours.

Room is big. The private onsen in our room is great. We had dinner in a private room which was a nice surprise.

We were staying at a different building of the hotel & it was a bit confusing to find our way to the main building's dinning room