Matsuyama, Ehime

Dogo Onsen is one of the oldest hot springs in Japan — old enough to appear in the Man'yoshu poetry anthology, old enough that its founding is simply listed as 'antiquity.' People have been coming here to soak for a very long time, which gives the morning market nearby a particular kind of continuity.

The market serves the residents of Matsuyama who want locally grown citrus, fresh fish from the Seto Inland Sea, and the tofu the city produces. But it is open to anyone who arrives in the morning — and the experience of shopping there, still warm from the bath, moving among people who know exactly what they want, is a way of inhabiting Dogo rather than just visiting it.

Ehime prefecture produces a range of citrus that the rest of Japan considers exceptional: the ponkan tangerine, the iyokan, the dekopon. At the morning market, these appear at prices reflecting where they were grown, not where they were shipped. The combination of bath and market is the correct Dogo morning.

In the town of the Dogo hot spring, you watch the fireworks. Matsuyama, the largest city on Shikoku, is home to Dogo Onsen—said to be the oldest hot spring in Japan, soaked in by emperors and immortalized in literature—and on a summer night its festival fireworks open over the Iyo sky.

This is a castle town with a literary soul. The poet Masaoka Shiki grew up here; the novelist Natsume Soseki lived and taught here and set one of his most beloved books in the city. To watch fireworks in Matsuyama is to watch them above a place that has shaped Japanese letters, the star-mines bursting over streets that writers walked and wrote.

The castle on its hill by day, the ancient hot spring, the fireworks by night—Matsuyama's summer unfolds at an unhurried pace, with the gentleness Shikoku is known for. The local custom is to soak in the bath and then step out into the warm evening to look up at the fire. After the hot water, the fireworks: that is simply the shape a summer takes in this old, literary, easygoing town.