The Best Hotels Near Kappou Shintaku, by the Record
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A three-room inn and Italian restaurant tucked into Yamagata's Okitama Valley, where the temperature swings are wide enough that the local vegetables and Yonezawa beef taste noticeably different for it. The chef makes his pasta by hand, dry-ages the beef, and composes the dining room with the same deliberateness as the plates. One suite has a Finnish sauna. Both face the fields. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.
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A centuries-old snow-country house hiding Arne Jacobsen Swan chairs and Tendo Mokko furniture inside is a particular kind of confidence. This small inn, a Michelin Key holder, divides its rooms across the main house and an old storehouse, each fitted with a private open-air bath fed by local hot springs and tended by dedicated attendants. The Nordic-meets-Japanese minimalism is as calm as the setting, which is saying something.
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Shigeru Ban designed this low-rise boutique hotel to sit among working rice paddies on the Shonai plain, and the architecture keeps making that point, with corridors and common areas that nod to the geometry of cultivation. Rooms lean into natural light and warm wood. The onsen floats in a saucer-shaped pavilion on the water. The restaurant draws from the surrounding farmland and coast. It's a place built around the idea of watching seasons move slowly, which sounds like a brochure promise until you're actually staring at flooded rice fields.
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Every room at this renovated onsen hotel on the Yamagata coast has its own private bath and a direct view of the Sea of Japan, which covers the basics handsomely. The rooms range from tatami-and-cypress traditional to a suite five stories up fitted entirely in white and glass, with one wild card: a room with a copper ceiling inspired by a nearby shrine. The communal stone baths and the town's only natural spring-fed drinking fountain round things out.