ONSEN
京都府
Kyoto Takenosatoson Onsen
京都竹の郷温泉
Hot Spring
# Kyoto Takenosatoson Onsen
There is a particular kind of surprise in finding thermal water rising in the middle of a residential district. Kyoto Takenosatoson sits not among mountain valleys or coastal cliffs but at the center of Rakusai New Town, a planned neighborhood in the western reaches of Kyoto. The facility opened in 1984, though the hot spring itself was not struck until 2002—meaning that for nearly two decades, people came here for lodging alone, and the water arrived almost as an afterthought, a late gift from below. A grand reopening in 2021 gave the place its current form.
What distinguishes the bathing here is the presence of two separate source springs: one a simple thermal water, the other a hydrogen carbonate spring. The two offer subtly different textures against the skin—one plain and calming, the other with a faintly slippery quality that leaves the body feeling rinsed in a way plain water cannot. At Manyo no Yu, the bathing facility, day visitors and overnight guests share the same pools, and there is something quietly democratic about that arrangement. You do not need to commit to a stay at Hotel Kyoto Eminence to know what the water feels like, though staying would let you return to it in the evening, and again before breakfast, when the pools are almost certainly less crowded and the mind less occupied.
To stay several nights here would be to experience Kyoto from an unfamiliar angle—not from a machiya in the old city center, but from a suburb where buses run to Arashiyama and Sagano, where Suzumushi-dera and Katsura Rikyū lie within a short drive, yet where none of these places press themselves upon you. The rhythm would be the rhythm of the new town itself: unhurried, residential, rather ordinary. And in that ordinariness, the two springs become the organizing fact of each day—a reason to rise, a reason to rest, a reason to stay one night longer than planned.
There is a particular kind of surprise in finding thermal water rising in the middle of a residential district. Kyoto Takenosatoson sits not among mountain valleys or coastal cliffs but at the center of Rakusai New Town, a planned neighborhood in the western reaches of Kyoto. The facility opened in 1984, though the hot spring itself was not struck until 2002—meaning that for nearly two decades, people came here for lodging alone, and the water arrived almost as an afterthought, a late gift from below. A grand reopening in 2021 gave the place its current form.
What distinguishes the bathing here is the presence of two separate source springs: one a simple thermal water, the other a hydrogen carbonate spring. The two offer subtly different textures against the skin—one plain and calming, the other with a faintly slippery quality that leaves the body feeling rinsed in a way plain water cannot. At Manyo no Yu, the bathing facility, day visitors and overnight guests share the same pools, and there is something quietly democratic about that arrangement. You do not need to commit to a stay at Hotel Kyoto Eminence to know what the water feels like, though staying would let you return to it in the evening, and again before breakfast, when the pools are almost certainly less crowded and the mind less occupied.
To stay several nights here would be to experience Kyoto from an unfamiliar angle—not from a machiya in the old city center, but from a suburb where buses run to Arashiyama and Sagano, where Suzumushi-dera and Katsura Rikyū lie within a short drive, yet where none of these places press themselves upon you. The rhythm would be the rhythm of the new town itself: unhurried, residential, rather ordinary. And in that ordinariness, the two springs become the organizing fact of each day—a reason to rise, a reason to rest, a reason to stay one night longer than planned.