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Unforgettable night at a 250-year-old ryokan
Imagine yourself walking a hot spring village after dark in a yukata and wooden sandals, unlocking nine public baths with your own key, and sleeping in a 250-year-old wooden inn that people swear inspired the bathhouse in Spirited Away. The wild snow monkeys are a bus ride and a forest walk from the door.
Adapted from How to DIY Japan as a Small Family — two weeks, five cities, no tour guides.
🎬 The bathhouse everyone thinks they recognize
Kanaguya has been taking guests since 1758. It's a tall, dark, wooden building of staircases and lanterns and corridors that don't quite go where you expect, and the first time you stand in front of it, something clicks — you're fairly sure you've seen it before.
You probably have, or think you have. Kanaguya is the ryokan most often named as the model for Aburaya, the bathhouse in Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away.
Studio Ghibli has never confirmed it, and has never confirmed any of the candidates. There are several: Dogo Onsen in Ehime and a handful of other historic inns all get named, and Kokuya, just up the street in this same village, makes the claim too. What's true is that the resemblance is striking, and that Joe Hisaishi, who wrote the score, grew up in neighboring Nakano City.
Nothing here is a confirmed film location, but the building feels like one and so does the village. That's arguably better, because nobody is there to tick it off a list.
🏮 The night we still talk about
It starts with your shoes. You take them off at the door, put on a pair of the inn's slippers, and the whole building goes quiet underfoot.
We got settled into our room, traditional tatami mats and paper screens, and then went straight for one of the private onsen baths. Just our family, door closed, nobody else in the water.
Dinner came after that: kaiseki, course after course, most of it things we could not have named.
Then we changed into the yukata and wooden geta sandals the inn provides, picked up a paper lantern, and walked out into the village. Cobblestones, steam rising out of grates, the particular hollow clack of geta on stone, and almost no one around who wasn't doing exactly the same thing.
5 more sections, including The nine baths, and the key
The rest of the guide — Booking Kanaguya, If Kanaguya is full: Kokuya, How to get there and 2 more — opens right here when you drop your email in.
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