Onsen in Chubu, Japan — 166 Hot Springs

Niigata · 12

Ryotsu Onsen
Gozu Onsen
Sakihana Onsen There are six inns here, lined along the Agano River in Niigata Prefecture, and that is almost the whole of it.
Oku Aga Onsen
Myoko Kogen Onsen
Teradomari Misaki Onsen The cape at Teradomari pushes westward into the Japan Sea, and the water here seems to carry that fact into itself.
Iwamuro Onsen There are places in Japan that exist not to astonish but to receive.
Tsukioka Onsen The water here is emerald green.
Matsunoyama Onsen What rises from the earth here is not simply hot water.
Senami Onsen The water here was never sought.
Arakawakyo Onsen
Echigo Yuzawa Onsen The town sits in a mountain basin along the Uonogawa river, where hot water has risen from the earth since the late Heia

Toyama · 5

Onagadani Onsen At the foot of Shirakamine, where the mountain begins to fold into itself, there is a small bathhouse that opened in 200
Unazuki Onsen The water here arrives from somewhere else.
Toyama Onsen
Shogawa Yutani Onsen
Kuronagi Onsen To reach this place, you ride a small open-sided train into the gorge of the Kurobe River, then walk.

Ishikawa · 22

Nakamiya Onsen The road into Nakamiya follows the contours of a mountain valley, narrowing as it climbs through Hakusan National Park t
Kaga Mitani Onsen The road from Daishoji station requires a taxi, and the driver may say little.
Chirihama Yawaragi Onsen The Noto Peninsula begins here, quietly, before the road narrows and the coastline grows wilder to the north.
Wakura Onsen What sets Wakura apart is the origin of its waters: they rise from beneath the sea.
Autumn Tennen Onsen
Yamanaka Onsen The waters here have been known since the Nara period, or so the legend goes — a monk named Gyōki, a white heron, the fa
Yamashiro Onsen The structure of the town itself tells you something.
Shika no Sato Onsen The water here did not arrive by design.
Shin-Iwama Onsen The water here does not come from beneath the inn itself.
Kyokusui Onsen In Kanazawa, most visitors turn toward the tea districts or the famous garden, and the city obliges them graciously.
Yanagida Onsen In the forested interior of the Noto Peninsula, away from the coast and its fishing towns, Yanagida sits quietly among t
Kawachi Senjō Onsen There are hot springs in Japan that emerge from centuries of quiet legend, and there are those that were summoned delibe
Fukaya Onsen The hills north of Kanazawa hold a particular kind of quiet.
Nebuta Onsen There is a legend attached to this water.
Yugawa Onsen
Yuwaku Onsen Yuwaku sits at the end of a road that follows a branch of the Asano River into the mountains behind Kanazawa — close eno
Katayamazu Onsen Katayamazu sits on reclaimed land — an artificial island, built during the Meiji era, jutting into Shibayama Lagoon.
Hakusan Ichirino Onsen At 540 meters above the valley floor, Hakusan Ichirino Onsen sits at the entrance to a road that climbs deeper into the
Hakusan Suginoko Onsen The road from Kanazawa takes about an hour by bus, following Route 157 as it narrows into the mountains toward Tedori Go
Awazu Onsen Thirteen inns, each drawing from its own source.
Wajima Onsen The waters here are remarkably alkaline — among the most so in all of Japan, the data tells us — and yet the onsen itsel
Kanazawa Onsen

Fukui · 10

Mikuni Onsen
Kuzuryu Onsen The Kuzuryu River moves quietly through the foothills of Arajima-dake, and the onsen that takes its name from that river
Imajo 365 Onsen The water here is a simple sulfur spring, rising at just under thirty degrees from the mountain ground of Minami-Echizen
Sano Onsen In the flatlands outside Fukui city, where rice paddies stretch without interruption, a farmer named Tsujioka Keizo once
Rokuroshi Onsen The water at Rokuroshi rose from a thousand meters below the plateau in 1987, drawn up through rock that had lain undist
Daianji Onsen
Tsuruga Tunnel Onsen There is something quietly arresting about a hot spring that owes its existence not to geological discovery but to a dri
Tsuruga Kirameki Onsen Rira Port The water here has an unlikely origin.
Tojinbo Onsen
Awara Onsen

Yamanashi · 17

Mitomi Onsen At seven hundred meters, the air already carries the weight of the mountains.
Sanjo no Yu The road to Sanjo no Yu ends before you arrive.
Shimobe Onsen
Sanogawa Onsen The road into Nansomachi follows the river, and the river follows its own logic — narrowing, bending, pressing between t
Shingen no Yu Yumura Onsen Fifteen minutes by bus from Kōfu Station, and already the city feels like something you merely passed through.
Kogen no Sato Onsen The road from Shimobe Onsen station takes the better part of an hour by the town's own bus, winding into the mountains o
Jumaiso Onsen The road that follows the Toguri River into the mountains of Yamanashi gives little warning before the inn appears.
Jikkoku Onsen
Nanbu Arcadia Onsen The name is almost too grand for what it is — a day-use bathing facility beside the Fuji River floodplain, in a small to
Enzan Onsen At the northern edge of Koshu city, where the ground rises gently toward the hill called Shio-no-yama, six inns have sto
Masutomi Radium Onsen
Narada Onsen To reach Narada, you ride a local bus for something close to ninety minutes from Minobu Station, the road narrowing as i
Fujikawaguchiko Onsen
Hottarakashi Onsen The name itself is a kind of confession.
Hayabusa Onsen The water here rises from a thousand meters below ground, and you can feel that depth.
Fukasawa Onsen There is a particular kind of absence that speaks.
Isawa Onsen

Nagano · 32

Shichimi Onsen The road into Shichimi climbs quietly through the mountains of Nagano's Takayama village, following the Matsukawa gorge
Kanbayashi Onsen
Kamisuwa Onsen A town does not accumulate four identities by accident.
Uenohara Onsen
Kamikochi Onsen The water here comes from Yakedake, the volcano that defines the skyline to the south.
Nakabusa Onsen The road from Hotaka Station climbs for forty minutes, tracing the Nakabusa River upward through narrowing valleys until
Nakajo Onsen
Nakatana Onsen
Nakayu Onsen There is one inn, and there is the mountain.
Maruike Onsen
Norikura Kogen Onsen
Shinshu Takayama Onsen
Kiriake Onsen
Shoya Onsen
Bessho Onsen There are hot spring towns in Japan that accumulate history the way river stones accumulate moss — not dramatically, but
Kita-Shiga Onsen The mountain flank of Kōsha-zan — known locally as Takai Fuji for the shape it cuts against the northern Nagano sky — do
Kitano Tenman Onsen Seven kilometers south of Sakae village, the road narrows and the valley closes in.
Wayama Onsen
Karasawa Kosen
Omachi Onsen
Oku-Tateshina Onsen
Hirugami Onsen There is something unusual about a hot spring that owes its existence to a railway never completed.
Shibu Onsen Thirty-seven springs feed this narrow valley in Nagano, each pushing water to the surface at sixty to ninety degrees.
Yomase Onsen On the southeastern flank of Kōsha-zan — the mountain locals sometimes call Takai Fuji — a hot spring was sunk into the
Iiyama Yutaki Onsen The Chikuma River moves quietly through the forest here, and the road — National Route 117 — follows it without ceremony
Yudanaka Shibu Onsen
Yudanaka Onsen The train from Nagano ends here.
Shirahone Onsen The water is white.
Utsukushigahara Onsen At eight hundred meters above sea level, on the lower slopes just outside Matsumoto, a cluster of twenty-two inns keeps
Tateshina Mimuro Onsen
Kakuma Onsen
Nozawa Onsen Thirteen communal bathhouses, scattered through a village of narrow, twisting lanes that climb the lower slopes of Mount

Gifu · 26

Mitsumune Onsen In the forested edges of Kani, where the city gradually gives way to trees, there is a bathhouse that carries itself wit
Mitadо Shinbutsu Onsen The water here was not sought.
Gero Onsen There is a particular kind of fame that becomes its own weather.
Shimojima Onsen The water here turns brown.
Nakatsugawa Onsen
Kushihara Onsen The road to Kushihara climbs quietly into the mountains at the southern edge of Ena City, where Gifu meets Aichi at a bo
Kuse Onsen The road into Kuse follows the Hisaka River through a narrow valley in Ibigawa, a part of Gifu Prefecture that most trav
Tsukechikyo Kuraya Onsen
Wariishi Onsen In 1976, engineers drilling for mineral veins in the mountains near Kamioka struck something they had not been looking f
Nannō Onsen There is something particular about bathing at a middle elevation — not high enough to feel removed from the world, but
Minami-Hida Masegawa Onsen The waters here came up in 1990, the result of a government initiative to revive rural communities — not centuries of ac
Shiozawa Onsen The bus from Nihonmatsu Station takes about thirty-five minutes, climbing away from the ordinary rhythms of the Tohoku M
Ogaki Onsen
Oshirakawa Onsen
Okuhida Onsen
Utsue Shijuhachitaki Onsen The road out from Takayama follows the grain of the mountains, and after thirty minutes or so the valley narrows and the
Anpachi Onsen There is a particular kind of place in Japan that exists not for the traveler but for the neighborhood — a place where t
Ibigawa Onsen
Hirayu Onsen There is something almost paradoxical about Hirayu.
Shin-Hotaka Onsen The road from Takayama takes about ninety minutes by bus, winding deeper into the mountains until the scale of things sh
Usuzumi Onsen There is something quietly disorienting about soaking in saltwater this deep in the mountains.
Rosoku Onsen In the mountains outside Nakatsugawa, in Gifu Prefecture, there is a single inn.
Yamato Onsen
Nigorikawa Onsen At eighteen hundred meters on the flank of Mount Ontake, the water that rises is the color of rust.
Nagaragawa Onsen The Nagara River moves through Gifu city with a kind of patient authority, and the small cluster of inns along its bank
Hida Takayama Onsen Takayama sits in a broad valley deep in the mountains of Gifu, a town that has kept the grain of its old merchant street

Shizuoka · 31

Shimoda Onsen Shimoda sits near the southern tip of the Izu Peninsula, a place most visitors pass through briefly on their way somewhe
Shimogamo Onsen The bus from Izukyū-Shimoda takes about twenty-five minutes, following the Aono River inland through hills that press cl
Naka-Izu Onsen
Imaihama Onsen The waters here do not come from the ground beneath your feet.
Ito Onsen Seven hundred and eighty springs feed this town.
Izu Taga Onsen
Izusan Onsen Somewhere between Atami's bustle and the quiet slope of the mountain, there is a place where hot water pushes itself out
Izu Yugawara Onsen The Chidose River runs quietly between two prefectures here, Shizuoka on one bank, Kanagawa on the other.
Izu Nagaoka Onsen Izu Nagaoka Onsen sits at the mouth of the Izu Peninsula, in a low basin ringed by modest hills, the kind of landscape t
Izu Kogen Onsen
Shuzenji Onsen The history here is not something you read about on a placard and move on.
Kurami Onsen
Yagisawa Onsen
Tsumetakawa Onsen
Kannami Onsen
Hokkawa Onsen
Kona Onsen
Yoshina Onsen In the folds of the Amagi mountains, along a narrow thread of river called the Yoshina, there are three inns.
Toi Onsen The western shore of the Izu Peninsula faces Suruga Bay with a quiet directness.
Dogashima Onsen The waters here are young, as onsen histories go.
Amagi Yugashima Onsen
Sagara Koomare Onsen The name alone carries something worth pausing over.
Matsuzaki Onsen The water here came up from the ground in 1963, the result of deliberate drilling rather than accidental discovery.
Umegashima Shinden Onsen
Umegashima Onsen The road follows the Abe River upstream for a long time—longer than you expect from a city like Shizuoka.
Umegashima Konya Onsen The road from Shizuoka city runs for roughly ninety minutes into the mountains, following the Abe River upstream until t
Kawazu Nanadaru Onsen The water is alkaline and simple — which in onsen terms means soft, unhurried, the kind that leaves skin feeling as thou
Atami Onsen Atami is not a place you discover; it is a place that has always been there.
Hatake Onsen The waters here are not dramatic.
Inatori Onsen The Izu Peninsula tapers southeastward into the Pacific, and near its lower edge, on a small cape facing Inatori Port, a
Kanzanji Onsen There are onsen towns that emerge from centuries of geological patience, and then there is Kanzanji, where the first wat

Aichi · 11

Mitaya Onsen The legend attributes the discovery of these waters to the itinerant monk Gyōki, which would place their origin some twe
Utsu Onsen There is a particular kind of place that teaches you something precisely because it no longer exists.
Minami Chita Onsen
Kira Onsen Along the shore of Mikawa Bay, in a part of Aichi Prefecture that few visitors think to seek out, a cluster of inns face
Shiotsu Onsen The water here is sodium bicarbonate — a soft, alkaline spring that has drawn timber workers and farmers for longer than
Odo Onsen The upper reaches of the Yahagi River cut through the hills of Aichi Prefecture quietly, far from the coastal cities tha
Owari Onsen There is something quietly improbable about finding one of Japan's hundred finest hot springs in the flat lowlands of Ai
Katahara Onsen The springs at Katahara did not always flow where they do now.
Soezawa Onsen There is a particular kind of place that exists more fully in memory than it ever did in the present tense.
Yugaya Onsen The waters here are sodium and calcium chloride springs, drawn from multiple sources along the Ure River as it cuts thro
Inuyama Onsen The water here was not discovered until 1995, drawn up from twelve hundred meters below ground.