Kindaichi Onsen

From Ninohe Station on the Tohoku Shinkansen, the local road drops south through farmland and then follows the Mabechi River upstream into a quiet valley. The river here is geologically unusual. The rounded stones on its bed are fossilized nodules, some containing imprints of ancient marine animals, and researchers have apparently been collecting them for years. Kindaichi Onsen sits on the banks of this fossil river, a cluster of seven traditional inns that have been drawing bathers since 1626, when the site was developed as a recovery retreat for samurai serving the Nanbu clan of Morioka Domain.

The water is alkaline, drawn from a simple spring that emerges warm and odorless and very clear. There is none of the sulfur sharpness you find further south in the volcanic zones. What you get instead is silk. The high alkalinity gives the water that characteristic slippery smoothness that feels like it is stripping something from your skin, and when you towel off and step outside into the cold Tohoku air, your skin holds warmth in a way it usually does not. The Ministry of the Environment designated Kindaichi a National Public Health Spa in 1994, which is a formal recognition of water quality standards that not many onsen achieve.

The most famous story attached to Kindaichi Onsen concerns a spirit called Kamemaro, a zashiki-warashi, which in Japanese folklore is a child-shaped house spirit that brings good fortune to wherever it lives. Kamemaro was said to inhabit one of the inns, Ryokufu-so, and the stories of guests encountering it and subsequently experiencing good luck stretched back generations. Then in October 2009, Ryokufu-so burned down in a fire that destroyed the building entirely. A small shrine called Kamemaro Shrine was built in the backyard of the rebuilt property, and it still stands.

The seven inns at Kindaichi are arranged along the riverbank in a row, close enough together that you can walk from one end to the other in ten minutes. Most allow day visitors to use the baths for a modest fee. The outdoor pools face the Mabechi River and the forest on the far bank, and in autumn the hillsides above the valley go a solid yellow-orange that reflects down into the current. This far north in Tohoku the light gets low early in September and the evenings cool off fast, which makes an outdoor pool beside a slow-moving fossil river one of the more pleasant ways to spend an afternoon.