Hawai Onsen

Coming from Tottori City, the Sanin Main Line follows the coast westward until it reaches Hawai Onsen Station, where you step onto a platform so close to Lake Togo that you can see the water immediately. The town name is not a typo or a tourism gimmick. It was the name of the area long before Hawaii became a well-known word outside the Pacific, and the official spelling in English omits the second i. Local shopkeepers have long since learned to find the confusion amusing. The lake itself is shallow and warm, fed partly by hot spring water rising from the lakebed, and the fog that rolls across it on cool mornings comes directly from the heat differential between the spring-warmed water and the air above.

Hawai Onsen was formally developed starting in 1866, when a man named Kosuke Yumura ran bamboo tubes from a spring vent beneath the lake to supply his first bathhouse. The fishermen in the area had noticed the lake water running warm in certain spots as far back as 1843, though documentary records of the region go back to 1258. The spring type is sodium and calcium chloride, with temperatures between 50 and 60 degrees at the source. In the bath, the water is clear and carries a faint salinity. The calcium content gives it a slight weight and leaves the skin feeling sealed against the cold after you climb out, which matters in a lakeside town where the wind comes off the water in autumn.

The most distinctive feature of the town is the Bokoro ryokan, which opened in 1931 and sits on a small reclaimed platform above the lake surface. You reach it by crossing a red bridge from the shore, and the outdoor bath positioned over the water gives the impression of floating between two open skies. Several other inns in the town have fishing lines hanging from their room windows directly into the lake below. In the evenings, guests actually use them. Down the main street, the footbath system known as the Baths of the Seven Lucky Gods connects seven separate ashiyu basins, each one named for a different deity, linked by a walking route through the town.

The train ride from Tottori Station to Hawai Onsen takes about thirty-five minutes. The hot spring area is small enough to walk entirely, and the lake path that circles the shore connects Hawai Onsen to the adjacent Togo Onsen district in under twenty minutes. Both areas sit within the Misasa-Togoko Prefectural Natural Park, and on clear days the low hills behind the lake reflect clearly enough in the water to make it hard to tell where the shoreline actually is.