Nagaragawa Onsen

Gifu City does not behave like a typical regional Japanese city. It has Gifu Castle sitting on a sheer volcanic rock right at its center, visible from almost everywhere in town, and the Nagara River running clean and broad through the northern edge of the urban area with almost no commercial development on its banks. The onsen district grows along the southern riverbank, a modest cluster of inns and bathhouses that look across at the forested hillsides of Mount Kinka. It is close enough to the city center to reach easily and far enough from the main shopping streets to feel genuinely quiet after dark.

The water at Nagaragawa Onsen is an iron spring, and it looks the part. It runs a warm reddish-brown, dense with dissolved minerals, and when you fill the bath you can see the color sitting in the water like very dilute tea. At pH 6.7 it is nearly neutral, not the aggressive acidity of some iron springs, and the texture is noticeably heavier than plain water. You feel it in the way the water holds the heat. Soaking in the deeper tones of the iron bath at night, with the river sounds filtering through the window, has an oddly grounding quality. The spring water at 42 degrees maximum is not punishing, just warm and thorough, and when you step out your skin keeps a faint warmth for a long time.

The thing that makes Nagaragawa unlike any other onsen town in Japan is what happens on the river between May 11 and October 15 every evening. Cormorant fishing, ukai, has been practiced on the Nagara River for over 1,300 years, and the Gifu version is the only one in Japan protected by the Imperial Household Agency as imperial fishing grounds. Each long wooden boat carries a master fisherman with a dozen cormorants on individual leashes. The birds dive, swallow ayu sweetfish whole, and are retrieved before they can digest the catch, their throats fitted with a small snare. Watching from a covered sightseeing boat that follows alongside, close enough to smell the torch smoke on the lead fisherman's hemp coat, is not a tourist recreation. It is one of the oldest intact fishing traditions still being performed in the world.

The ryokans along the Nagara River all offer ukai package plans, meaning you eat dinner, cross to the sightseeing boat, watch the fishing in the dark, and return to a bath waiting for you back at the inn. If you time the water right and arrive when the bath is freshly drawn, the reddish-brown iron water in the outdoor tub is still slightly steaming, and across the river Mount Kinka sits black against the sky with the castle lit up on its summit. It is a very specific kind of Japanese evening that Nagaragawa delivers without drama or effort.