Yuwaku Onsen

A bus from Kanazawa Station climbs southeast for about forty minutes through the city's outer neighborhoods and then up into the forest. The road follows the Tatsumi River into the hills, and by the time it reaches Yuwaku Onsen the city has completely disappeared. There are nine small inns in the village, most of them old wooden buildings set among trees along the river, and the whole place operates at a pace that is hard to reconcile with the fact that Kanazawa's gold leaf workshops and geisha districts are just twelve kilometers away. During the Edo period, the Maeda lords who controlled Kaga Domain used these hills for hunting, and they used the springs for recovering afterward. The village was their private retreat, and it has kept that slightly enclosed, protected feeling ever since.

The water at Yuwaku is sodium bicarbonate, lightly alkaline, emerging at 32 degrees Celsius from the source and heated for bathing use. The spring has a faint gypsum content that the locals believe is responsible for the water's skin-softening properties, and the Yuwaku spring water has traditionally been used in the preparation of Kaga Yuzen silk dye. Kaga Yuzen is the regional textile tradition of Kanazawa, distinguished from Kyoto's Nishijin weaving by its direct-painted, muted floral patterns, and the slightly alkaline chemistry of the Yuwaku water was used historically in the rinsing stages of the dyeing process. Whether or not that history changes how you feel soaking in it is up to you, but knowing the same water touched both the silk and your skin gives the bath a different register.

Yunokuni no Mori, a craft village about five minutes from the main inn cluster, offers hands-on workshops in Kaga Yuzen dyeing, Kutani pottery, and gold leaf application. It is not a tourist recreation. The workshops are taught by working craftspeople and take a couple of hours. Combining a morning in the craft village with an afternoon soak at one of the valley inns is the most honest way to use Yuwaku, because it connects the water to the art that grew up beside it rather than treating the spring as a standalone amenity.

The landscape in autumn is excellent. The forest above the village holds a mix of maple and beech that turns orange-red in October, and the river below the inns reflects the color back in the mornings when the light is coming from the east. There are walking trails from the village up into the Tatsumi River gorge that take two to three hours and require no special equipment. In winter, the snow on the cedar branches above the outdoor baths produces a kind of gravity-held stillness that the Kanazawa region is known for. The city gets more tourists than it can comfortably handle in cherry blossom season. Yuwaku, quietly, does not.