The waters here were found by accident — a farmer drilling an irrigation well in 1883, searching for something to feed the rice paddies of the Sakai Plain, struck hot mineral water instead. That origin feels fitting. Awara sits surrounded not by mountains or dramatic coastline but by flat, quiet farmland, and the onsen town that grew up on this plain carries the unassuming character of its setting. It was known, for a long time, as the inner parlor of Kansai — a place where people from the cities to the south came to rest, not to be impressed. By 1927 it had been designated one of Japan's Hundred Landscapes, and through the years before the war, it gathered a steady, understated reputation.

In 1956, a great fire swept through and leveled much of the town. What rose in its place was rebuilt along a careful grid, streets crossing at right angles, a kind of order imposed on loss. The inn called Kaikatei, where Emperor Showa stayed during his postwar tour in 1947, survived as a thread connecting the town to its earlier life. Seventy-four individual springs feed the district — not one grand source but many small ones, each supplying its own establishment, giving each bath a slightly different mineral character. The connection to Eiheiji, the great Zen monastery not far away, lingers in local memory: travelers would come here after days of temple austerity, a tradition once called *shōjin otoshi*, the gentle release from abstinence.

To stay several nights in Awara is to settle into a rhythm shaped by the plain around it. The town is flat, quiet, cyclable — bicycles can be borrowed from Awara Yunomachi Station — and there is little to distract from the essential practice of bathing, eating, walking short distances, and bathing again. The grid layout means you are never lost, and the absence of spectacle becomes, after a day or two, its own kind of relief. The waters are the reason to come, and the waters are enough.