Hotel rooms are certainly harder to come by these days. I'm having hard time finding rooms in some of the places in Hokkaido for this summer. Some places don't open up room inventory until 3-4 months out. But at places that are taking bookings already, there's not much left.

But the interesting thing is that, when you contact some of these hotels, their actual room availability and the online availability differ. If you're after a non-smoking room at a given hotel that's only showing smoking rooms as available online, it's always worth emailing the hotel and checking with them directly.