Hi — I’m Tabiiku. I travel around Japan with my daughter on the principle that experience is the best thing you can give a child. This is Hotel Harvest Nasu, in the Nasu highlands north of Tokyo. Short version: an old-fashioned large Japanese resort hotel that delivers exactly what you would expect for the price, no more and no less — with one genuinely excellent feature.
The room
We took one of the larger family rooms, combining Western and Japanese styles. You can feel its age in places, but it is spacious, and it was big enough to have relatives staying in other rooms come and join us, which I appreciated.
The Western and Japanese halves can be separated with a sliding door, so once your child is asleep you can sit up in the tatami room. One warning: the mattresses are very firm and I would not call them comfortable.
There is a bathtub in the room, but the onsen facilities are excellent, so go to the communal baths.
On the room itself, my verdict is neither good nor bad. If your expectation is “this is what an older Japanese hotel is like”, it neither exceeds nor falls short of that.
Facilities and activities
Harvest Nasu is an established large resort, and the activities were a real plus. Table tennis first: 1,000 yen an hour regardless of how many of you there are, with bats and balls included. You book on the day because you take the whole room, and it works for everyone from small children to grandparents.
The pool is shallow and short, and there are enough people in it that you are not going to swim lengths, but it is fine for splashing about. Better, the stairs from the pool lead straight down into the onsen, so you can warm up the moment you get cold. There are two different baths plus an outdoor one, and sitting in the open-air bath under genuinely clear air and visible stars was wonderful. The onsen is the best thing about Harvest Nasu. The one irritation is that you have to carry your towel down from your room and carry it back — cutting service in the name of being eco-friendly is a particular bugbear of mine.
There is also a small games arcade and a few karaoke rooms, which is the sort of thing older Japanese hotels do well.
Food
My daughter is a fussy eater, so we took the buffet for both dinner and breakfast. Both are in the same restaurant.
Two practical notes. Book your dinner time when you book the room — we tried to change ours on the day and were told it was full. Breakfast cannot be reserved: you take a numbered ticket from a tablet outside the restaurant on the morning and are seated in order. Around 8am it gets very busy, so go early.
The selection is not enormous, but this is the Nasu highlands and the vegetables and dairy — yoghurt, pudding, milk — were fresh and good. The one thing I would ask them to fix is that the only juice at breakfast was vegetable juice, which is a hard sell with a child.
So: an older-style Japanese hotel that will not disappoint if you go in expecting what the price suggests, and will not amaze you either. The value is reasonable, so if the hotel is not the point of the trip it is worth considering.
Hotel Harvest Nasu is a Tokyu Harvest Club property and is not listed on the international booking sites. If you are looking for somewhere to stay in Nasu:
Hotels in Nasu on Booking.com
Hotels in Nasu on Agoda
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