Where to Stay in Ikaho Onsen

伊香保温泉 · 20 inns bookable in English, from $114 a night

Ikaho is built up a stone stairway. Three hundred and some steps climb from the bottom of the town to the shrine at the top, with inns, bath houses and shops opening off them, and the whole place tilts. It is one of Gunma's oldest hot springs and one of the few where the layout itself is the attraction. For a visitor, the practical point is that Ikaho has the deepest English-bookable inventory of anywhere in this guide — twenty properties across the full range, from large hotels that will not blink at a foreign booking to small inns of a dozen rooms.

The connection

Ikaho has no direct tie to Oguri Tadamasa, and this guide will not invent one. The connection is geographic and it is a real one: the Oguri sites at Kurabuchi are an hour of mountain driving from anywhere useful, and Ikaho is the nearest place where that drive ends in a hot spring rather than a station platform. If you are visiting Tozenji and the Gonda residence site, this is where the day should finish.

Getting there, and when

From Takasaki, take the Joetsu line to Shibukawa and a bus from there. If you have hired a car for Kurabuchi — and you should — Ikaho is a straightforward drive north. Two water types are served in the town: the brown iron-bearing kogane no yu, which is the historic one, and the clear shirogane no yu. Inns differ in which they draw, so check if it matters to you. Weekends and the autumn colour season fill first.