Kakeyu Onsen

From Ueda Station on the Hokuriku Shinkansen, the bus ride into the hills above the Chikuma River plain takes forty minutes on a road that climbs through cedar and broadleaf forest before leveling out at a small plateau. Kakeyu Onsen sits at the center of a tight cluster of about thirty inns along a riverside avenue that has been in use since before the Edo period. The name comes from a local story about injured deer: hunters following a wounded animal supposedly watched it wade into a particular spring repeatedly until the wound closed. The founding legend runs this way for a lot of Japanese onsen towns, but at Kakeyu the deer story shows up in enough records from enough different periods that it seems to have been taken seriously for a long time.

The spring water here is simple-alkaline at 45 degrees, clear and colorless, with a faint slippery quality on the skin that is characteristic of higher-alkalinity waters. It is not as dramatically alkaline as Iiyama, but it is distinctly smoother than neutral water, and you notice it immediately on entry as a lack of resistance, as if the water wants to let you through. Long-time visitors use the phrase hadanururu, meaning skin-slippery, to describe it. The inn culture at Kakeyu runs toward the traditional end: wooden buildings, corridor baths, low tables, and the assumption that guests are there to rest for two days and not be hurried.

One specific practice that sets Kakeyu apart is the encouragement to drink the spring water as well as bathe in it. A small facility called Monju no Yu near the center of the village offers both bathing and a drinking fountain where visitors take cups of warm spring water to treat digestion and various internal conditions. This kind of drinking-bath culture, nomun onsen, is much less common than ordinary bathing and requires a spring that is mild enough to be safe. Kakeyu's alkaline water qualifies.

The plateau setting means winters are serious, with significant snowfall turning the narrow avenue into a compressed white tunnel between the old inn fronts. In late October the maples between the buildings go bright red and drop into the river, and the contrast between the hot pale water in the outdoor baths and the cold air coming off the Chikuma valley is the version of this experience you will remember longest.