Where to Stay in Aizu-Wakamatsu

会津若松 · 27 inns bookable in English, from $55 a night

Aizu-Wakamatsu gives you a choice most castle towns do not. You can sleep in the town, ten minutes' walk from the castle, in a business hotel at a hundred dollars; or you can go fifteen minutes up the valley to Higashiyama, where the inns are old and expensive and built along a river, and come back down in the morning.

Rakuten files all of it as one area — the city — because it has no separate listing for Higashiyama. That is useful and misleading at the same time: useful because one search covers everything, misleading because the list puts a four-hundred-dollar ryokan next to a fifty-five-dollar room and sorts them as though they were the same product.

The connection

Higashiyama is old. The usual claim is that the monk Gyoki found it in the eighth century, which is the usual claim about a great many Japanese hot springs and should be read as meaning "old". What is better evidenced is its role as the Aizu domain's own spa, where the lord's household went, and its afterlife as the place the town recovered in.

The more interesting connection is the one nobody advertises. In the autumn of 1868 the government army came over these passes to lay siege to the castle, and the valley you are driving up to reach the inns is the ground they came through. Ashinomaki, the second hot spring in the list, is further out towards the Okawa gorge and is a separate place from Higashiyama — eight to eleven minutes from its own station, not from the town.

Getting there, and when

Three hours from Tokyo: Shinkansen to Koriyama, then the Ban-etsu West line to Aizu-Wakamatsu. The town's sites are on two loop buses, the Haikara-san and the Akabe, which run in opposite directions round the same circuit — the castle, Iimoriyama and the Bukeyashiki are all stops.

Most of the Higashiyama inns quote their distance as minutes by car from Nanukamachi Station rather than on foot, which is a fair description: this is a valley, not a walkable village from the town. Several run a shuttle. Ask when you book.

Winter is real here. Aizu sits in snow country and the inns are busiest and dearest around it; the castle in snow is also the best the castle ever looks.