# Hinokamigami Onsen

At the foot of Sentsūzan, in the inland reaches of Shimane Prefecture, there is a small cluster of accommodation that most travelers will never think to seek out. Oku-Izumo is that kind of place — folded into the mountains, reached by a single-track railway and then a local bus from Izumo Yokota station, the journey itself a gradual quietening. Hinokamigami Onsen sits at the end of this thinning-out, modest in scale, with three source springs and a handful of places to sleep.

The water is alkaline and simple — *tanjun-sen*, as the Japanese classify it — and it surfaces at 26 degrees, cool enough that it must be coaxed to bathing temperature, yet generous in flow at 800 liters per minute. It is said to be one of three hot springs in Japan particularly known for its effect on the skin, leaving it soft in a way that takes a day or two of soaking to fully notice. The springs were developed only in the 1980s, which gives the place a certain unpretentiousness; there is no mythology of centuries here, only the mountain and what it quietly yields.

To stay several nights at a place like Hinokamigami — at Hinokamigamisō or the smaller *minshuku* Tanabe — is to enter a rhythm that has little to do with itineraries. The mountain presence of Sentsūzan is constant. The bus comes and goes. The water receives you again each evening. There is not much to do, which turns out to be the point.