Ginzan Onsen takes its name, "silver mine hot spring", from the Nobezawa silver mine in the mountains of Obanazawa, Yamagata Prefecture. One local history dates the first silver vein to 1456, found by Giga Ichiroza'emon of Kaga Province; at the start of the Edo period, in 1613, the shogunate took the mine under direct control, and at its peak as many as 1,600 houses stood around it. Production waned toward the end of the seventeenth century. Accounts differ on when the hot water was found, most often crediting miners digging for silver; either way, the springs outlived the mine and became a place to take the waters.
In 1913, the second year of the Taishō era, the Ginzan River flooded and wrecked many of the inns. They were rebuilt over the Taishō and early Shōwa years as the town looks today: multi-storey wooden ryokan, some in a Western-influenced style, lining both banks of the narrow river, in bare timber framing and white plaster, some decorated with kote-e, reliefs worked in plaster. There are no modern buildings. The centre is closed to cars, and after dark the bridges and the street are lit by gas lamps.
The rebuilt town struggled for visitors for years. It became known across Japan when NHK used it in its 1983 morning drama Oshin, and Shinkansen access brought visitors back from 1999. Kengo Kuma has since reworked the century-old Fujiya inn behind its original post-and-beam front, the old mine workings were made a National Historic Site in 1985, and the town's snow scenes have drawn a sharp rise in visitors from abroad.
Viendor — the Hanoi workshop that sold as Book Nook Global — says the kit came from a trip its team made to Japan in 2022 and took seven months to design; its founder calls it his favourite. The scene is a run of traditional wooden houses along the river around a main ryokan, and the hardest part, Viendor says, was getting a single motor to drive two separate movements: a server moving about inside the ryokan, and water pumps at the smaller houses by the river. It is 1,116 pre-cut, pre-coloured parts in birch, acrylic, metal and PU leather, building to 21 cm high, 24.5 cm wide and 23 cm deep, with an LED light set on 4.5–6 V (the equivalent of three AA batteries). Viendor rates it expert, eight to ten hours, and counts it among its largest kits. Earlier production batches carried Vietnamese text in the manual alongside the English; newer ones are English and Spanish, and newer products have moved to USB-C power.