Ginzan Onsen

Forty minutes by bus from Oishida Station on the JR Ou Main Line, the road follows the Ginzan River upstream until it arrives at something that genuinely looks like a film set. Ginzan Onsen occupies a short stretch of canyon, wide enough for one narrow pedestrian lane on each bank and no cars at all. The buildings are multi-story wooden ryokan from the Taisho era, built close together with their foundations right at the water's edge, and at night the bridges and walls are lit by gas lamps that have been burning here for decades. The town was discovered, roughly speaking, by silver miners in the early Edo period. They found the hot springs while working the Enzawa Silver Mine nearby, and when the mine closed, the baths stayed.

The water is a sodium-chloride and sulfate spring emerging at around 63 degrees. Inside the bath it is colorless and neutral-smelling, not the sharp sulfur you find in volcanic springs further west. The main thing you notice is the weight of it, a slight density that holds heat against your skin in a way that plain water does not. The warmth lasts a long time. In winter, when the valley fills with two or three meters of snow and the temperature drops well below zero, that heat-retention quality is not a detail. It is the reason people come back.

The most distinctive building in town is Fujiya Inn, which the architect Kengo Kuma redesigned in the early 2000s. He kept the original post-and-beam facade intact and grafted a glass entry wall and interior atrium onto it, producing something that is simultaneously a hundred-year-old wooden inn and a piece of contemporary architecture. The design does not shout. From the bridge across the river, the glass catches the gaslight at dusk and the building looks like every other tall wooden structure in the canyon, until you step inside.

At the far end of the pedestrian lane, past the last inn, the 22-foot Shirogane-no-Taki waterfall drops into the river with a sound that carries back through the whole town on still nights. In winter the falls partially freeze while the hot spring steam rises around the ice, which is the image most often associated with Ginzan and is exactly as dramatic in person as it looks in photographs. The Shinkansen to Shinjo Station is the practical starting point, with the local bus from there taking about thirty minutes to reach the canyon entrance.