Tenninkyo Onsen

Tenninkyo Onsen sits at the end of a road that does not go anywhere else. You drive or take a local bus from Asahikawa through the farmland edge of Higashikawa town, and the landscape shifts from wide Hokkaido agriculture to narrow forested valley as the Chubetsu River guides you into the gorge it has been cutting for tens of thousands of years. The gorge walls are columnar basalt and hardened volcanic ash from an eruption roughly 30,000 years ago, and they rise on both sides of the road in formations that look almost carved. The valley floor is dim and cool even in summer, and the river runs fast and cold alongside the single track of road. When the road stops, you are at the cluster of ryokan that make up Tenninkyo Onsen, and the waterfalls start just beyond.

The most significant waterfall is Hagoromo-no-taki, a 270-meter cascade that drops in seven tiers down a sheer rock face at the back of the gorge. It was named in 1918 by a literary scholar who said the white water falling over the dark cliffs reminded him of a celestial maiden's trailing robe, hagoromo, from classical Japanese mythology. That name has held. The falls are included in Japan's list of 100 great waterfalls, and on a clear morning the light catches the upper tiers from the viewing platform in a way that makes the name feel accurate rather than poetic. Further up the hiking trail, Shikishima Falls drops with enough force that the locals have nicknamed it the Niagara of the East, which is an ambitious comparison but captures the scale of the sound.

The hot spring water at Tenninkyo is a sodium chloride and sodium bicarbonate type, clear and soft on the skin, without the strong sulfur character you find at more volcanic Hokkaido springs like Noboribetsu to the south. The water is warming without being aggressive. It is the kind of onsen that rewards a long soak rather than a quick hot plunge, and given what is outside the window of the outdoor baths, a long soak is easy to sustain. The ryokan position their rotenburo to face the gorge walls and the river below, so you sit in hot water and look at 30,000-year-old columnar rock formations rising into the Hokkaido sky.

At the entrance to the gorge, just before the road reaches the ryokan, there is a small footbath pavilion called Tennyo no Ashiyu where hikers returning from the waterfall trails can rest their feet in the hot spring water before getting back in the car. It is a practical, undecorated structure, just a trough of running hot water and a wooden bench, but it is usually occupied at any hour of the day. Autumn is the most-visited season, when the rowan and maple on the gorge slopes turn the cliff faces red and gold, and the contrast between the bright foliage and the dark basalt columns is the kind of color combination that Hokkaido does better than anywhere else in Japan.