AURA POETRY — ONSEN INDEX

Onsen in Shikoku

An index of 42 hot springs across Shikoku, arranged by prefecture. Choose a name to open its page.

Tokushima · 8

  • Hachiman Onsen At the foot of Bizan, the low mountain that watches over Tokushima city, there is a spring that has been flowing since 2
  • Shikimiya Onsen To reach Shikimiya is to drive — and keep driving.
  • Oboke Onsen
  • Shishikui Onsen Route 55 follows the Tokushima coastline with a certain plainness, and Shishikui Onsen sits alongside it without ceremon
  • Shin-Iya Onsen There are places that come into being not from abundance but from necessity.
  • Tsukigadani Onsen The road into Kamikatsu follows the Katsuura River upstream, and the valley grows quieter the longer you drive.
  • Iya Onsen
  • Kamiyama Onsen The road from Tokushima follows the river inland, and the valley narrows gradually until the hills feel close on either

Kagawa · 9

  • Shikoku Takamatsu Onsen There are hot springs that announce themselves with scenery — mountain passes, cedar forests, the sound of water before
  • Shionoe Onsen
  • Shodoshima Onsen What arrives first is not the water but the crossing.
  • Aji Onsen The water here is cold — 18 degrees Celsius — and that fact alone sets Aji apart from most of what Japan calls onsen.
  • Konpira Onsen
  • Shiratone Onsen The water here is known as kinuhada no yu — the silk-skin bath — and the phrase is not ornament.
  • Miai Onsen At the foot of the Asan Mountains, where Kagawa Prefecture edges toward the Tokushima border, the Doki River runs upstre
  • Mikado Onsen
  • Kajukai Onsen The hotel sits partway up Ishizuchiyama, a modest hill rising to just over two hundred meters above the city of Takamats

Ehime · 14

  • Kume no Yu In the southern reaches of Matsuyama, away from the castle and the crowds that gather beneath it, there is a bathhouse t
  • Sadamisaki Kamegaike Onsen The Sadamisaki Peninsula stretches long and narrow into the sea from western Ehime, and somewhere along its southern slo
  • Besshi Onsen The mountains behind Niihama carry their own kind of weight.
  • Minami Dogo Onsen The name teiregi belongs to a wild herb that grows along the edges of this part of Matsuyama, and it also belongs to the
  • Furuiwaya Onsen The road to Furuiwaya climbs steadily into the mountains of Kuma Kogen, a plateau town in the interior of Ehime Prefectu
  • Tatara Onsen Ōmishima sits in the Seto Inland Sea like something the water has been keeping to itself.
  • Oku Dogo Onsen The Ishite River narrows as it moves upstream from Matsuyama, and it is here, in the folds of a small gorge, that the wa
  • Himehiko Onsen Matsuyama is already known to most visitors — the castle on the hill, the trams, the proximity of Dogo.
  • Hosenbo Onsen Thirty kilometers into the mountains of Ehime Prefecture, the road narrows and the valley deepens, and Hosenbo arrives n
  • Higashi Dogo Onsen
  • Tobe Onsen The water at Tobe rises from more than eight hundred meters underground, arriving at the surface at twenty-nine degrees
  • Dogo Onsen Three thousand years is not a figure that clarifies anything, really.
  • Dogo Saya Onsen The name carries the echo of Dogo, one of Japan's most storied hot spring towns, but Dogo Saya sits a few kilometers to
  • Nibukawa Onsen In the valley where the Kijigawa cuts through granite and granodiorite, the water rises cold from the rock — twenty-two

Kochi · 11

  • Kitagawa Onsen The Nahari River runs alongside Kitagawa Village with a quiet persistence, and it is this river — rather than any famous
  • Shimanto Onsen
  • Tosaryu Onsen The water here is drawn from 1,700 meters underground, and when it rises it carries the color of that depth — a clouded,
  • Befukyo Onsen The road into Befukyo takes time.
  • Kinoka Onsen
  • Matsuhagawa Onsen Deep in the mountains of Kochi Prefecture, past the last bend of the road from Kubokawa, the valley closes around you be
  • Kuwatayama Onsen Five kilometers north of Susaki, the road narrows into the hills of Kochi Prefecture, and the town falls quietly behind
  • Yosakoi Onsen The road east from Kochi follows the curve of the coast, and somewhere along Route 55, the land rises.
  • Yoi Onsen The Shimanto River meets the Hiromi River here, at a fold in the mountains of Nishitosa.
  • Ashizuri Onsen At the very tip of the Ashizuri Peninsula, the land runs out.
  • Umaji Onsen Umaji sits along the Yasuda River in the mountains of Kochi Prefecture, reached by a long drive inland from the coast —