Akiu Onsen

A bath for an emperor

Akiu lies in the upper valley of the Natori River, on the western edge of Sendai city in Miyagi. The local chronicle places its founding in the sixth century, in the reign of the twenty-ninth Emperor Kinmei (531 to 539), whose persistent skin condition is said to have cleared after water carried up from Akiu was brought to the capital for his bath. The emperor's gift in return was the title Natori no Miyu, "the imperial bath of Natori," and with it a place in the small group later known as the Nihon San Miyu, the three onsen towns formally honored as imperial baths: Akiu in Mutsu, Bessho in Shinano, and Nozawa in northern Shinano. The designation was reaffirmed in the early Kamakura period by Emperor Juntoku.

Twelve centuries later the valley became a domain bath of the Date clan. Date Masamune, the one-eyed founder of the Sendai han, visited often to rest from campaign and from the long winters of the castle town, and the cooperative still cites this Edo-era patronage as the spine of its modern hospitality.

Salt water on a quiet river

The setting is unhurried. The Natori river cuts a broad gorge through the foothills of the Ōu range, and the inns line both banks where the valley opens out, half an hour by road from central Sendai. The water is sodium and calcium chloride, drawn at moderate temperatures from several source wells, soft in the body and gently saline on the tongue, the kind of water the old guidebooks call mild and warming. A short drive upriver brings you to Akiu Ōtaki (秋保大滝), a single fifty-five-meter drop counted among Japan's three great waterfalls.

Gyūtan, zundamochi, and the painted gorge

The town's kitchen belongs as much to Sendai as to the onsen. Gyūtan, charcoal-grilled beef tongue, is the city's signature dish and easy to find in every ryokan dining room. So is zundamochi, soft rice cakes coated in a pale green paste of mashed edamame, sweet and faintly grassy, a Tōhoku sweet older than the modern resort. In the heart of the onsen town, the Rairaikyō gorge (磊々峡) carries the Natori through a narrow corridor of carved stone; a stepped walking path follows the water for about a kilometer, an easy half-hour loop between two baths.