ONSEN
滋賀県
Biwako Onsen
びわ湖温泉
Hot Spring
# Biwako Onsen
There is something worth sitting with in the fact that a hot spring can simply cease to exist. Biwako Onsen, on the shore of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture, is no longer a place you can visit. Its sole inn, known as Momiji, opened in 1946 and closed in 2013, and what remains is mostly the idea of it — alkaline simple waters said to ease neuralgia and rheumatism, an open-air bath that faced the vast surface of the lake, and the memory of a resort that once tried, perhaps too eagerly, to be many things at once.
For decades, the establishment shifted its name and its identity — from Momiji-kan to Hotel Momiji to Ryotei Momiji — as if searching for the right posture in a changing world. Beside it stood Biwako Paradise, an amusement park that once even operated a train hotel built in Europe. One imagines the odd pairing: the quiet mineral soak and, just next door, the clatter of rides. It is the kind of arrangement that feels very postwar Japan — optimistic, improvised, a little unsteady — and it lasted longer than one might expect, nearly seven decades, before age and declining fortunes brought the curtain down.
What lingers, for someone who never went, is the thought of that bath facing the lake. Lake Biwa is Japan's largest, and from the district of Chagasaki in Ōtsu, its surface would have stretched to the horizon like an inland sea. To soak in alkaline water while watching that expanse — neither ocean nor river but something quieter, more self-contained — must have offered a particular kind of stillness. It is gone now, and there is no retrieving it, which is perhaps the most honest thing one can say about any place that mattered.
There is something worth sitting with in the fact that a hot spring can simply cease to exist. Biwako Onsen, on the shore of Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture, is no longer a place you can visit. Its sole inn, known as Momiji, opened in 1946 and closed in 2013, and what remains is mostly the idea of it — alkaline simple waters said to ease neuralgia and rheumatism, an open-air bath that faced the vast surface of the lake, and the memory of a resort that once tried, perhaps too eagerly, to be many things at once.
For decades, the establishment shifted its name and its identity — from Momiji-kan to Hotel Momiji to Ryotei Momiji — as if searching for the right posture in a changing world. Beside it stood Biwako Paradise, an amusement park that once even operated a train hotel built in Europe. One imagines the odd pairing: the quiet mineral soak and, just next door, the clatter of rides. It is the kind of arrangement that feels very postwar Japan — optimistic, improvised, a little unsteady — and it lasted longer than one might expect, nearly seven decades, before age and declining fortunes brought the curtain down.
What lingers, for someone who never went, is the thought of that bath facing the lake. Lake Biwa is Japan's largest, and from the district of Chagasaki in Ōtsu, its surface would have stretched to the horizon like an inland sea. To soak in alkaline water while watching that expanse — neither ocean nor river but something quieter, more self-contained — must have offered a particular kind of stillness. It is gone now, and there is no retrieving it, which is perhaps the most honest thing one can say about any place that mattered.