Awara Onsen Kofuyuden Beniya

Beniya has welcomed guests since 1884, operating initially as an inn for travelers along the Hokuriku coast before becoming, in 1951, the first government-registered international tourist ryokan in the region, hosting writers, entertainers, and the Imperial family over its long tenure. A fire in 2018 destroyed the original structure, but not the institution. The family commissioned architect Tetsuo Kobori to rebuild on the same site, and what opened in summer 2021 is a low, single-storey inn whose offset-axis rooms are joined by intimate tsuboniwa pocket gardens. Echizen washi papers the walls; Echizen tansu line the corridors. The new Beniya is a deliberate architectural act designed to honor ryokan form while placing Fukui's finest crafts at its center.

Each of the 17 rooms draws from one of four proprietary spring sources in the garden, where sodium-calcium chloride water at 70°C flows continuously through a semi-open-air bath positioned to admit both sky and garden. This is kakenagashi in its strictest sense: source-to-bath, undiluted, running around the clock. The Shakudani stone basins, quarried from nearby Echizen, soften to blue-grey when wet. A larger communal bath and a bookable private rental bath offer additional options for guests who welcome a change of setting.

The kitchen holds a Michelin Key, earned under head chef Murata Hiroshi, who has shaped Beniya's kaiseki programme for over two decades. Menus draw from local farmers and fishermen, tracing Fukui's seasons through spring mountain vegetables and autumn matsutake to the winter apex: Echizen crab, tag-certified, brought whole to the room and carefully dismembered tableside by a nakai who works with practiced, unhurried precision. Dinner and breakfast are both served in-room, on low lacquered tables beneath paper-shaded lamps.

The proprietress greets each arriving party in person, and returning guests have noted she remembers them by name across years of visits. The staff-to-guest ratio is high relative to the inn's modest scale, and that attentiveness reads not as performance but as structural habit. Guests arrive by complimentary shuttle from JR Awaraonsen Station, 15 minutes away, which connects via the Hokuriku Shinkansen for arrivals from Kanazawa or Fukui City.

The inn rewards a winter visit above all others: Echizen crab shapes every course from November through March, and the kakenagashi bath steams into cold night air while the tsuboniwa holds its stillness outside the wooden frame. The sensory memory most guests carry away is a simple one: the room bath open to the night garden, a bowl of crab miso cooling slowly on the tray beside you.