Iizaka Onsen

There is a small private railway called the Fukushima Kotsu Iizaka Line that runs from Fukushima Station north-northwest through rice fields and quiet suburbs to a terminal stop: Iizaka Onsen Station. The trip takes twenty-five minutes and the train is a single car, older, not crowded except on weekends. When you step off at the end, you are in a town that has been doing this since before records were kept clearly, a place where the oldest bathhouse opened under a name that translates roughly as Mackerel Lake Bath, and where a famous haiku poet stopped in 1689 on his way north.

Matsuo Basho passed through Iizaka in the summer of that year, during the journey he documented in Oku no Hosomichi, and the town he encountered had four bathhouses, seventy-four households, and three hundred people. Today it has over forty ryokan and nine public baths, but Sabakoyu, that oldest bathhouse, still stands near the center of the village, rebuilt in wood after the original structure wore out, its entrance facing the street at a slightly formal angle. The water flowing into its communal tub comes out of the earth near fifty degrees Celsius, which is on the hotter end of what most people can sit in comfortably. Locals are used to it. First-timers often do not last long.

The spring water at Iizaka is classified as a simple thermal type, which is a way of saying it is not loaded with one dramatic mineral compound. It is colorless, essentially odorless, and soft on the skin. What it has is temperature and volume, with enough heat to genuinely warm the deep muscles after a long day. The town itself is quiet in the way that old resort towns that predate modern tourism often are, more worn than polished, with a few restaurants and sake shops along the main street and residents who use the public baths the way you might use a neighborhood gym.

The most direct way to visit is the combination that Basho would have understood: arrive by train, walk to Sabakoyu, soak until the heat becomes too much, walk back through the steam-scented evening air, and eat at a small place near the station. Iizaka does not perform for visitors. It just stays open and hot.