Yumura Onsen

Getting to Yumura Onsen from Kyoto requires a train to Kinosakikaigan or Hamasaka on the San'in Coast Line, then a bus ride inland through the low Tajima hills. The road follows a narrow river valley, and by the time the bus deposits you in Yumura, the valley has narrowed to a crack between steep forested walls. The village is small enough to walk in five minutes, and the main source spring, called Arayu, sits right in the center of a small stone plaza surrounded by wooden lattice fencing. You will smell it before you see it. At 98 degrees Celsius, this is one of the hottest naturally flowing springs in Japan, and the steam above the source rises in a column that bends in the mountain wind and catches the afternoon light in winter.

The water at Yumura is sodium chloride in composition, weakly alkaline, and pumps out of the Arayu source at 470 liters per minute. Because it is so hot, it cannot be used for bathing without being blended down with cold water, but that is not why most people come to the source itself. The tradition here is to bring a net bag of eggs and corn and lower it into the boiling flow for a few minutes. The eggs come out perfectly cooked, their whites set firm but the yolks still slightly yielding, and the corn goes translucent and sweet from the mineral water. You eat them standing on the stone plaza while the steam curls around your hands. It is one of the most straightforward pleasures in Japanese onsen culture.

The baths themselves use the cooled and blended spring water, which still arrives to your skin at a proper soaking temperature. Because the source is pure sodium chloride, the water has a faint, clean saltiness on your lips and a substantial warmth that does not fade quickly once you are out. Your skin will feel slightly tight and smooth in the way that sea water leaves it after swimming. The town has a small covered walkway along the riverbank with an outdoor ashiyu footbath built into the stone beside the water, and on cold mornings the sight of twenty people sitting on wooden benches with their feet in the steaming channel, watching the river run past, is about as restful a scene as Japan produces.

The San'in Coast just to the north is a UNESCO Global Geopark, and the sea cliffs at Takeno or the sea stacks at Kasumi are within thirty minutes by car or bus. Yumura works well as a base for that coastline rather than just a destination unto itself. The small town has maybe a dozen inns and no big resort hotels. Most of the ryokan are built right against the river, their outdoor baths cantilevered over the water so that you can listen to the current below while you sit in the heat above it. The combination of that near-boiling source spring steaming in the open air and the cold river running fast below the bath decks gives this place a physical aliveness that larger, more polished resort towns tend to lose.