ONSEN
徳島県
Shikimiya Onsen
四季美谷温泉
Hot Spring
# Shikimiya Onsen
To reach Shikimiya is to drive — and keep driving. Nearly two and a half hours from the Tokushima interchange, the road follows the Naka River and then its tributary, the Sakazukitōgawa, narrowing as the mountains press closer on either side. By the time you arrive, you have passed through something more than distance. The settlement sits in a small basin where the valley floor briefly opens, a waterfall called Niida no Taki visible on the far bank. It is the kind of place that exists because the water beneath it insisted.
The waters are a simple sulfur spring, and the bathing history here reaches back to the Edo period. A text from 1812, the *Tōkaroku*, records the site under an older name — Shikimitani, written with characters for the star anise tree that once marked the valley. For generations this was a tōjiba, a place people came not for a single afternoon but for days, letting the sulfur work slowly into sore joints and weathered skin. The inn that eventually formalized these visits, opening in 2001 with nine guest rooms and a restaurant, carried forward that unhurried purpose. Yet since April 2024 the facility has been closed, and for now the valley holds its silence differently — not the quiet of guests soaking after dark, but the quiet of a place paused, waiting.
What it might feel like to stay here for several nights, when the doors reopen, is perhaps what matters most. Nine rooms is small enough that you would learn the rhythms of the staff, hear the same water running at the same hour. The sulfur would settle into your towel, your clothes, your sense of time. Across the river the waterfall would go on falling. After a few days you would stop noticing the distance you had traveled to get here, which is perhaps the point of any place this far from the expressway. The remoteness is not a feature to be admired. It is simply the condition that lets everything else — the water, the valley, the long slow evenings — become enough.
To reach Shikimiya is to drive — and keep driving. Nearly two and a half hours from the Tokushima interchange, the road follows the Naka River and then its tributary, the Sakazukitōgawa, narrowing as the mountains press closer on either side. By the time you arrive, you have passed through something more than distance. The settlement sits in a small basin where the valley floor briefly opens, a waterfall called Niida no Taki visible on the far bank. It is the kind of place that exists because the water beneath it insisted.
The waters are a simple sulfur spring, and the bathing history here reaches back to the Edo period. A text from 1812, the *Tōkaroku*, records the site under an older name — Shikimitani, written with characters for the star anise tree that once marked the valley. For generations this was a tōjiba, a place people came not for a single afternoon but for days, letting the sulfur work slowly into sore joints and weathered skin. The inn that eventually formalized these visits, opening in 2001 with nine guest rooms and a restaurant, carried forward that unhurried purpose. Yet since April 2024 the facility has been closed, and for now the valley holds its silence differently — not the quiet of guests soaking after dark, but the quiet of a place paused, waiting.
What it might feel like to stay here for several nights, when the doors reopen, is perhaps what matters most. Nine rooms is small enough that you would learn the rhythms of the staff, hear the same water running at the same hour. The sulfur would settle into your towel, your clothes, your sense of time. Across the river the waterfall would go on falling. After a few days you would stop noticing the distance you had traveled to get here, which is perhaps the point of any place this far from the expressway. The remoteness is not a feature to be admired. It is simply the condition that lets everything else — the water, the valley, the long slow evenings — become enough.