Noboribetsu Jigokudani

The bus from Noboribetsu Station climbs for about twenty minutes through ordinary suburbs before the landscape shifts without warning. The road narrows, the trees press in closer, and then the air starts to smell wrong in a good way, sharp and sulfurous, like the earth has cracked open just ahead of you. When you step off at the Noboribetsu Onsen bus terminal and walk five minutes uphill, you arrive at the rim of Jigokudani. There is no soft introduction. The valley floor is smoking, the rock is stained yellow and rust-orange and white with mineral deposits, and the sound of the ground hissing at you is constant and slightly unsettling.

Jigokudani is a volcanic crater left by an ancient explosion, and it now pushes out roughly 10,000 tons of spring water every single day. That water comes in multiple chemistries depending on which vent it exits from. Some pools are a milky blue-white from dissolved sulfur, with a thin skin of fine particles that clings to your arm when you reach in. Others are clear and acidic enough to sting a small cut. The temperature across the valley ranges from a hot 45 degrees up past 90 where the vents are most active, and on cold mornings the steam rises so thick you lose sight of the boardwalk ten meters ahead.

What makes Jigokudani different from every other geothermal site in Japan is that the valley is alive with mythology as much as steam. The town fills its streets with oni, the horned demon figures of Japanese folklore, who are said to dwell in the valley and guard its waters. A giant red oni statue stands at the edge of town, and every few hundred meters along the boardwalk you find smaller ones grinning from rock ledges. According to local legend, the Yukijin demons appear on the eighty-eighth night after the first day of spring to retrieve all illness and misfortune from the town, burning them away in fire. That is not a piece of history anyone here takes lightly.

The single best moment at Jigokudani happens on Thursday and Friday evenings in summer. At 8:30pm, fireworks launch directly from the Hell Valley Observatory, sending colored light crashing over the smoking crater. From below on the boardwalk, the rockets burst overhead while the ground beneath you literally steams and hisses. It is a strange, slightly chaotic, utterly Japanese experience that you will not find replicated anywhere else. Come in the morning for the stillness and the chemistry lesson. Come in the evening for the fire.