Wakura Onsen

The Hokuriku Shinkansen drops you at Kanazawa and from there the Nanao Line runs northeast across the base of the Noto Peninsula. The landscape changes as you go, from the flat coastal plain to low hills covered in camellias and then down to the shore of Nanao Bay, which is wide and grey-green and almost completely enclosed by the surrounding peninsulas. Wakura Onsen Station sits right at the water's edge, and the ryokan of the resort are visible from the platform, their wide wooden facades and tiled roofs arranged along the shoreline as if placed there specifically to be seen from a moving train.

Wakura has one central hot spring source that supplies every inn in the resort from a single well. There are no private wells here, no independent boreholes, no variation from one building to the next. All the hot water in the town comes from the same point, a submarine-origin source that was first documented centuries ago, and the arrangements for distributing it have been in place since the modern resort took its current form. The water is a sodium bicarbonate type, emerging at 89 degrees Celsius and cooled before it reaches the baths. It is colorless and clear, with a slightly softening, almost soapy quality from the bicarbonate that stays on your skin long after you have dried off.

The location on the bay is what distinguishes Wakura from the inland onsen towns of Ishikawa. The better ryokan have baths that look out across Nanao Bay, and at high tide the water surface reaches close enough to the buildings that you can hear it. In the morning, fishing boats move out through the pale light across the bay, and if you are in an outdoor bath at that hour the combination of steam and sea mist makes the view almost indistinguishable from the water itself. The Noto Peninsula coast is known for seafood, particularly oysters and snow crab in winter, and the kaiseki menus at the inns here are built around what comes out of Nanao Bay.

Wakura was used as a setting in a famous 19th-century woodblock print by Hiroshige, which gives it a particular status among Japanese travelers who grew up seeing that image. The town has not tried to live down to nostalgia or up to modernity, and what you find when you arrive is simply a serious, unhurried place to sit in hot water and look at the sea.