# Kimita Onsen

In the mountain interior of what was once called Bingo Province, Kimita Onsen sits alongside a roadside station in Mitoshi's Kimita-cho district, the kind of place where someone might pull off the highway not quite sure what they are looking for. The water here is a sodium bicarbonate spring — jūsōsen — and it is rare enough that visitors come from as far as the San'in coast to the north and Hiroshima's southern lowlands to reach it. The spring itself was struck in 1988, the result of a rural revitalization initiative, and the bathhouse opened nearly a decade later in 1997. A 2024 renovation has given the facilities a fresher face, though the water, of course, has not changed.

That water is the reason to linger. A sodium bicarbonate spring is sometimes called "beauty water" for the way it leaves the skin feeling clean and faintly soft, as though the surface tension of ordinary life has been gently loosened. Spending several nights here, one might begin to feel the cumulative effect of that — a gradual settling, an easing that is less dramatic than some famous hot spring towns but perhaps more lasting precisely because of that. The Haramichi-o Museum stands quietly nearby, and the roadside station carries the rhythm of local traffic in and out.

There is something straightforward about Kimita that suits it well. No elaborate mythology, no centuries of legend. Just a spring found in the late twentieth century, made available to the people around it, and still drawing them in.