>>20140302
>Wow, how far in advance did you book that?
IIRC I booked it about 6 months in advance, and stayed in late April. This was from my 2017 trip. I think it was the week before Golden Week. Food was excellent. I hate to say it though, but I can't really remember much about the bath, which was in the main building and required a short outside walk.
I came back over this summer for another 3 weeks, and went Kanazawa -> Matsumoto -> Tokyo -> Lake Towada -> Aomori (stayed in Odate) -> Noshiro -> Sendai. I appreciated the baths a lot more this trip, and Tokyo, Odate, and Sendai were the only places where I had a private bathroom. The onsen hotel I stayed in at Wakura Onsen, near Kanazawa, was especially impressive. I splurged hard on that one, had a 3 room suite with dinner and breakfast, and an outdoor bath on the room balcony overlooking Noto bay. The public bath at that place was easily the biggest I've ever been in, around 1300-1400 sqft for the men's indoor bath alone. Pic related is the view from the dining room during dinner, also looking out over the bay towards Notojima.
>>20140332
Nakano Broadway has some great stores. A bunch of the Mandarake shops there have interesting facades that stand out from the normal stuff. They also have a model railway shop with a bunch of railway memorabilia and some of the older, much larger metal model trains.