# Nebuta Onsen

There is a legend attached to this water. A wounded boar, it is said, found its way to a spring on the Noto Peninsula and healed itself there — and in that old story, passed down through the tradition of Kōbō Daishi's pilgrimage through these coasts, something of the water's character is preserved. The spring at Nebuta, in Wajima's Ōno district, carries a pH of 10.5, which places it firmly in the category of strongly alkaline waters. What that means in practice is a quality that Japanese bathers call *tsurutsuру* — a silkiness against the skin, almost the feeling of something being gently removed rather than added. The warmth, too, is said to linger in the body longer than one might expect.

The inn here is a single establishment, *Kaiyu Noto no Sho*, and that solitariness shapes the atmosphere considerably. One does not arrive to find a row of competing guesthouses or the noise of a resort district. The Noto coast is not that kind of place. The inn holds indoor baths, an open-air bath, and a viewing bath that faces the Sea of Japan — and that orientation toward the water seems, in a quiet way, to be the point.

To stay several nights here would be to settle into a particular kind of stillness. The nearest bus terminal is in Wajima, seven minutes away by car, and the roads that approach from the Noto Satoyama Airport take roughly thirty minutes. The distance is not inconvenient, but it is enough to make the decision to arrive feel like a considered one. The alkaline water, the solitary inn, the grey expanse of the Japan Sea beyond the glass — these things do not announce themselves. They accumulate, slowly, over a day or two.