Onsen in Tohoku

An index of 149 hot springs across Tohoku, arranged by prefecture. Choose a name to open its page.

Aomori · 28

• Sannai Onsen Sannai sits in the low hills southwest of Aomori city, close enough to feel the pull of the urban grid yet quietly remov
• Kamikita Onsen
• Shimofuro Onsen The name itself carries a distant echo.
• Furo Fushi Onsen
• Gonohe Makiba Onsen In the farming country of Aomori's Sannohe district, where the land opens into pasture and the horizon sits low and unhu
• Hakkoda Onsen At the foot of the Hakkoda mountains, roughly fifty minutes by car from Aomori city, the land opens into a quieter regis
• Towadakohan Onsen The water here did not exist until 2003.
• Minamida Onsen The story of Minamida Onsen begins not with a dynasty or a legend, but with a pragmatic act of care.
• Komaki Onsen
• Furutobe Onsen The water here was not sought.
• Karatake Onsen There is a particular quality to places that have been receiving people for a long time without ever seeking attention.
• Jogakura Onsen The road from Aomori city takes roughly eighty minutes by bus, climbing steadily toward the western flank of the Hakkōda
• Sakanoseki Onsen In the southern reaches of Hirosaki, where the Ou Main Line threads through quiet agricultural land, there is a small in
• Daibo Onsen The water at Daibo came up from the earth in 1967, a consequence of black ore mining rather than any deliberate search f
• Owani Onsen In the valley along the Hirakawa River, in the southern reaches of Aomori Prefecture, a town has arranged itself quietly
• Oirase Keiryu Onsen The waters here did not originate where you find them.
• Hiraka Onsen
• Itadome Onsen There is a legend, light and unverifiable, that a court noble once came to this valley along the Aseishi River and found
• Asamushi Onsen There is a particular kind of resort town that has already had its heyday, and in the quiet that follows, becomes someth
• Tara Pokki Onsen There is a legend attached to this corner of Aomori — a wounded crane found healing in these waters, and the place came
• Michinoku Onsen There is a particular kind of place that becomes more present in absence.
• Nuruyu Onsen The name itself tells you something: nurui, meaning lukewarm.
• Mutsu Yatate Onsen Mutsu Yatate Onsen sits on Yatate-yama, a hill above the Tanabe district of Mutsu city, on the Shimokita Peninsula — tha
• Ikarigaseki Onsen
• Ochiai Onsen The waters at Ochiai did not come easily.
• Tsuta Onsen The road to Tsuta takes time, which is perhaps the point.
• Sukayu Onsen
• Kuroishi Onsen-kyo The Asase River moves quietly through the Tsugaru interior, and along its course, spread across some twenty-five kilomet

Iwate · 25

• Ichinoseki Onsen
• Irihata Onsen
• Senganjuku Onsen Eleven kilometers from the center of Kanegasaki, the road narrows and the cedars press closer, and then there is almost
• Minami-Amihari Arine Onsen The water here is young, as onsen histories go.
• Dai Onsen The valley that holds Dai Onsen is narrow, the kind of place where a river — the Daigawa — sets the pace of everything.
• Kunimi Onsen The road from Shizukuishi climbs steadily into the Ōu Mountains, and by the time you arrive at Kunimi Onsen, at 850 mete
• Geto Onsen
• Geto Kogen Onsen
• Osawa Onsen The water here is mild — weakly alkaline, simple in its chemistry — and that simplicity is perhaps the point.
• Himegami Onsen Between Iwate-san and Himegami-san, in the northern reaches of Morioka, there is a single inn.
• Appi Onsen There are, in fact, two places that share this name, and the distance between them tells you something about what hot sp
• Shidotaira Onsen The Toyosawa River moves through this valley with a certain indifference, as rivers do, carrying the sounds of the place
• Higashi-Hachimantai Onsen There is a particular quality to places that have had to reinvent themselves.
• Towa Onsen There is something quietly instructive about a place that did not know it had hot spring water until 1996.
• Matsukura Onsen Matsukura sits at the entrance to the Hanamaki Minami Onsen Valley, where the Toyosawa River shapes the land into someth
• Matsukawa Onsen The water is milky white, heavy with sulfur, and it has been rising from this ground since at least 1743, when the sprin
• Suijin Onsen
• Nagaoka Onsen In 1976, someone drilling for agricultural water in the hills of Kanegasaki, Iwate, struck something unexpected.
• Azumane Onsen The road to Azumane runs through orchard country.
• Yuda Onsen Kyo Along the Waga River in Iwate Prefecture, a handful of hot springs are scattered through a gorge, each one its own small
• Semi Onsen
• Tsunagi Onsen
• Hanamaki Onsen What strikes you first is not the water but the scale of the intention.
• Sukawa Kogen Onsen
• Ojuku Onsen The name comes from a warbler — an uguisu — said to have been seen healing itself in the waters long ago.

Miyagi · 22

• Nakayamadaira Onsen Nakayamadaira sits at the western edge of the Naruko cluster, along a river gorge in Miyagi Prefecture, and the first th
• Futakuchi Onsen Near the headwaters of the Natori River, in the mountains south of Sendai, there was once a single inn.
• Sakunami Onsen The city of Sendai is close enough that you could, in theory, arrive by bus along Route 48, watch the Hirose River narro
• Minami Sanriku Onsen
• Daigamori Onsen At the foot of the Nanatsu-mori hills in Miyagi Prefecture, a cold sulfurous spring rises quietly from the earth.
• Onagawa Onsen The water at Onagawa is alkaline and low in dissolved minerals — what the Japanese classify as teitōsei arukarisei, a qu
• Joge Onsen
• Obara Onsen The Shiroishi River moves quietly through its valley in Miyagi Prefecture, and Obara Onsen sits along its bank as if it
• Gaga Onsen
• Kawatabi Onsen
• Higashi-Naruko Onsen What strikes you first is not the water but the quiet — a stillness scored at its edges by the sound of the Arao River m
• Sawaoto Onsen The road from the highway exit takes only a few minutes, yet the forest closes around you almost immediately.
• Kamoshika Onsen On the slopes of Zao, in the southwestern corner of Miyagi Prefecture, there is a place that exists not quite as a desti
• Yuhama Onsen There is only one inn at Yuhama Onsen, and it does not use electricity.
• Shiroishi Yuzawa Onsen Northeast of Shiroishi city, along Route 113, the mountains close in gradually.
• Akiu Onsen
• Sasaya Onsen The road to Sasaya climbs through the kind of forest that discourages casual visitors — the sort of mountain corridor th
• Miyagi Zao Onsen
• Togatta Onsen At the eastern foot of the Zao mountain range, Togatta has been receiving bathers since 1601—a place built not for spect
• Aone Onsen The water here rises from beneath an aonuki tree — or so the story goes — and has been doing so since 1528.
• Kurikoma Kogen Onsen
• Naruko Onsen What stays with you about Naruko is not any single bath but the sheer variety of water beneath one small town.

Akita · 28

• Kamihata Onsen In the southeastern corner of Akita Prefecture, in a district called Masuda-machi, there is a small onsen that opened in
• Nyuto Onsen
• Nikaho Onsen In the old province of Dewa, now the southwestern edge of Akita Prefecture, the town of Nikaho sits close to the Sea of
• Hachimantai Onsen
• Yashiro Isaribi Onsen
• Karamatsu Onsen At the foot of the Dewa Mountains in Akita Prefecture, where the Funaoka River moves quietly through forested hills, the
• Natsuse Onsen In the mountain interior of Semboku, well beyond where the road feels purposeful, there is a single inn.
• Ouchi Poporokko Onsen
• Ofuka Onsen In the mountains of Akita, along a side road off the Hachimantai Aspite Line, there is a small bathing place that does n
• Oyu Onsen
• Otaki Onsen The waters here carry the character of their chemistry plainly: sodium, calcium, sulfate, chloride — a compound that lea
• Okuse Onsen In the mountains of Akita prefecture, in the district once known as Hinai, Okuse Onsen sits quietly beside the memory of
• Okama Onsen The bus from Tazawako Station takes nearly an hour to reach Nyuto Onsen-go, climbing into the mountains of Senboku at a
• Tae no Yu Onsen There is a point, about fifty minutes by bus from Tazawako Station, where the road narrows and the mountains close in, a
• Oyasukyo Onsen Fifty minutes by bus from Yuzawa Station, following a road that narrows as the mountains close in, you arrive at a small
• Yamanote Onsen There is a particular quality to a place that exists alone in the forest — not isolated by neglect, but simply by intent
• Kobirikubi Onsen
• Goshogake Onsen On the western slope of Hachimantai, where Akita and Iwate prefectures meet along a watershed ridge, the earth is not qu
• Mizusawa Onsen
• Kasumi Onsen In the mountain interior of Yuri-Honjo, along Route 105, there is a single inn.
• Yuse Onsen The name tells you almost everything you need to know: a place where hot water once rose directly from the shallows of a
• Tamagawa Onsen It takes roughly eighty minutes by bus from Tazawako Station, and the road narrows as the mountains close in.
• Tazawako Kogen Onsen
• Oga Onsen
• Akita Shirakami Onsen The Tohoku coast has a way of stripping things down.
• Akinomiya Onsen
• Ganiba Onsen
• Tsurunoyu Onsen There is a single inn at the end of a narrow road, surrounded by beech forest, and when you arrive you understand that a

Yamagata · 19

• Imagami Onsen The road to Imagami Onsen in Yamagata's Tozawa village ends where pavement does — ten kilometers of unpaved forest track
• Otaira Onsen To reach Otaira is to descend.
• Tendo Onsen
• Ubayu Onsen At 1,300 meters, on the crater remnants of Dainichidate, the water at Ubayu arrives already carrying a history that stre
• Sagae Onsen The water here is ancient in a way the town itself is not.
• Onogawa Onsen There are places whose reputation rests not on grandeur but on a single, persistent claim — that the water here does som
• Yamabe Onsen The Suikawa River runs quietly past Yamabe, a small town in Yamagata Prefecture where the surrounding streets belong unm
• Shintakayo Onsen There is only one inn here.
• Gassan Shizu Onsen The waters here are young.
• Sakuranbo Higashine Onsen
• Iide Soekawa Onsen The rice fields of Iide-machi do not announce themselves.
• Kaminoyama Onsen
• Himawari Onsen
• Atsumi Onsen The water here comes from three source wells, pumped up from beneath the low hills along the Atsumi River, about two kil
• Ringo Onsen In Asahi, a small town in Yamagata Prefecture, a bathing facility sits partway up a modest hillside northeast of the tow
• Yunohama Onsen The water here has been rising since the eleventh century, long before anyone thought to build concrete walls around it.
• Hijiori Onsen Seventeen wooden inns line the banks of the Dōzangawa, pressed against the eastern rim of a caldera two kilometers acros
• Akayu Onsen The name means "red hot water," and there is a legend tracing the discovery of these springs to 1093, when a warrior nam
• Ginzan Onsen The first thing to understand about Ginzan Onsen is that it was never meant to be beautiful.

Fukushima · 27

• Nakagawa Onsen The valley that holds Nakagawa Onsen is narrow and unhurried.
• Nakanosawa Onsen Somewhere on the western slope of Mount Adatara, in the mountains of Fukushima Prefecture, a single source pushes out 13
• Nakanovu There is a spring on the northern slope of Bandaisan that no longer has walls around it, no roof, no register to sign.
• Futamata Onsen
• Goshikinuma Onsen
• Aizu Hongo Onsen The Aga River moves through this part of Fukushima without ceremony.
• Shinobu Onsen Ten kilometers west of Fukushima Station, the mountains begin to close in, and the road narrows accordingly.
• Tadami Onsen The water at Tadami is dark.
• Tsuchiya Onsen There are places whose claim to distinction is not a single celebrated feature but a quiet accumulation of substance ben
• Shionosawa Onsen In the hills of Ishikawa-machi, in Fukushima Prefecture, a single inn sits near the boundary between two towns.
• Oshio Onsen What arrives first is the carbonation.
• Oshio Urabandai Onsen The water here is a salt spring — shokusen — and that fact alone tells you something about the land it comes from.
• Dekodaira Onsen
• Higashiyama Onsen The waters here have been running for well over a thousand years.
• Bohata Ishikawa Onsen
• Kitsuneuchi Onsen The hills outside Shirakawa hold a particular kind of quiet — not the quiet of absence, but of distance maintained.
• Kurogane Onsen To reach these waters you must walk.
• Sakai Onsen The water at Sakai Onsen did not arrive by any ancient legend.
• Iwaki Yumoto Onsen The water here carries sulfur in it—sodium chloride, tinged with the smell of something deep and unfinished beneath the
• Bandai Atami Onsen The name itself carries a small riddle—Atami, here, is not the famous coastal resort but a town tucked along the Gohyaku
• Naraha Hagurosan Onsen The water here is yellow-brown, tinted by chloride minerals pulled from the ground, and when you look closely you notice
• Ashinomaki Onsen The town sits on a bluff above the Aga River in Aizu, Fukushima Prefecture — eight inns and hotels looking down at the w
• Iwaki Kaniara Onsen The water here is classified as a simple cold mineral spring, mildly alkaline, drawn from ground that sits almost at the
• Urabandai Kawakami Onsen The mountain that made this place also nearly erased it.
• Koriyama Onsen
• Iizaka Onsen The water here is old — old enough that the chronicles tie it to Yamato Takeru, old enough that Matsuo Bashō stopped on
• Takayu Onsen At seven hundred and fifty meters on the flanks of the Azuma range, six inns hold to a single conviction: the water need