Shuzenji Onsen

The Izu-Hakone Railway runs south from Mishima Station into the hills of the Izu Peninsula, and at Shuzenji Station you switch to a bus for the final ten-minute climb into the valley. What you arrive to is compact and quiet, a single town wrapped around both banks of the Katsura River, with Shuzenji Temple at the center and a bamboo grove path running along the western bank. The bamboo here is thick, the culms close together and tall enough to form a proper tunnel of green overhead, and the Katsura runs clear below the red Kaede Bridge that crosses it in the middle of the grove. The combination of the wooden bridge, the bamboo canopy, and the sound of the river is exactly the image that makes Shuzenji appear in so many travel photographs.

The spring water is a simple alkaline type with a pH of 8.5, coming out of the ground between 38 and 45 degrees. In the bath, it feels distinctly soft, the kind of water that seems to have less resistance to it than ordinary hot water. There is no sulfur smell and no color. The alkalinity acts on the surface of the skin over time, removing oils gently and leaving a smoothness that you notice when you dry off. The outdoor foot bath at Tokko-no-Yu, built directly over the spring vent in the middle of the river, is where to start. It is the oldest spring in the Izu region, and the current wooden bathhouse above it is built over the same vent where legend says Kobo Daishi struck a rock with his walking stick in the early ninth century and released the water.

The history at Shuzenji runs darker than the bamboo grove suggests. The exiled Minamoto no Yoriie, second shogun of the Kamakura period, was murdered here in 1204, on orders from his own family. His grave and a small museum nearby hold that story without dramatizing it. Natsume Soseki, one of Japan's most read modern novelists, nearly died at Shuzenji in 1910 from a severe gastric hemorrhage while on retreat here. He later wrote about the experience in an essay called Omoidasu koto nado, and it is considered one of the more honest accounts of serious illness in modern Japanese literature.

The town is organized well for a half-day visit, with the bamboo path, the temple, and the footbath all within easy walking distance of the bus terminal. For an overnight stay, the ryokan along the river bank have indoor and outdoor baths that use the same alkaline spring water, and the town empties of day visitors by early evening, leaving the bamboo grove lit softly and the river audible from most windows.