Nikko Yumoto Onsen

Most visitors to Nikko stop at Toshogu Shrine and turn back for Tokyo. The ones who keep going board the bus at Tobu-Nikko Station and follow the road that climbs for forty minutes through increasingly wild forest, past the Kegon waterfall, along the shore of Lake Chuzenji, and finally up to a plateau at 1,500 meters where the trees thin out and the air smells of something between cold water and struck matches. Yumoto is at the end of this road, a small collection of inns and bathhouses at the northern edge of Lake Yunoko, and it is far enough from the shrine complex that almost everyone who arrives here has made a deliberate decision to be here.

The springs at Yumoto were discovered, according to established tradition, by the Buddhist monk Shodo Shonin in the year 788. Shodo is the founder of Nikko in any practical sense: he built the first temples here, established the religious routes through the mountains, and is credited with finding or sanctifying nearly every significant site in the region. The water he found at Yumoto is a sulfur spring that comes from the earth a remarkable emerald green, then turns milky white on exposure to air as the sulfur compounds oxidize. By the time it reaches the baths, it is an opaque, pale jade color in summer and almost pure white in the colder months. The pH runs around 6.5, close to neutral, and the sulfur smell is strong and immediate but not aggressive. The water temperature at source reaches 78 degrees and is mixed down for use.

The most specific visual experience at Yumoto happens at the point where the lake's outlet stream, the Yukawa River, drops away from the flat plateau surface at Yudaki waterfall, a wide curtain of water about ten meters high. The Senjogahara Plateau Nature Trail starts here, running south through marshland and forest for roughly four kilometers to Ryuzu Falls and Lake Chuzenji. In late October this entire trail runs through peak foliage, and the contrast of the yellow larch groves against the dark volcanic rock is intense. Coming back from the trail at dusk, when the wooden bathhouses of Yumoto are already lit from inside and their steam is rising into cold mountain air, creates the particular reward that long alpine walks exist to deliver.

The town itself is a few streets. There is a small shrine built over the hot spring source, a public foot bath by the lake shore, and a handful of ryokans whose outdoor tubs look directly at Lake Yunoko, which sits in a shallow volcanic basin with no development on its far bank. The combination of Nikko's historical weight, Toshogu's gilded excess a forty-minute bus ride back down the mountain, and the quiet, milky baths up here makes Yumoto feel like the version of Nikko that the monk was actually trying to build.