Arima Onsen

A bath older than the chronicles

Arima is one of the three ancient springs of Japan, named alongside Dōgo in Ehime and Nanki-Shirahama in Wakayama. The Nihon Shoki records that Emperor Jomei stayed here in 631 to recover from illness, and the Pillow Book lists Arima among the three most famous waters in the country. Two monks shape the rest of the legend: Gyōki in the 8th century, who is said to have founded the temple that now anchors the upper town, and Ninsai in the 12th, who is credited with reviving the springs after they had fallen silent.

The figure modern Arima talks about most, though, is Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He first bathed here around 1583 and returned nine times before his death. After the Keichō earthquake of 1596 wrecked the wellheads, Hideyoshi funded a complete rebuild of the source works and the temple, and put up a private villa called Yuyama Goten on the slope above. The infrastructure he commissioned held for roughly 350 years. The two stone bridges crossing the gorge through the town still carry his name and his wife Nene's.

Gold water, silver water, narrow lanes

Arima is famous for serving two completely different waters from the same village. The kinsen (金泉, "gold spring") rises iron-rich and heavily saline, oxidizing on contact with air into the rust-orange opacity that gave it its name. The ginsen (銀泉, "silver spring") is the clear counterpart, carrying radium and dissolved carbon dioxide. Both flow into the two municipal bathhouses, Kin no Yu and Gin no Yu, and into the ryokan that climb the hillside above the river.

The townscape is dense and small. Wooden inns, steep stone-paved lanes, a single shopping street called Yumotozaka that climbs toward Onsenji temple. Despite that backwater feel, Arima sits on the north slope of Mount Rokkō above Kobe, and the Rokkō–Arima Ropeway connects it to the ridgeline in twelve minutes. From Sannomiya in central Kobe it is barely thirty minutes by subway and Hokushin line.

What to take home

Local sweets lean on the tansan (carbonated) water that bubbles up alongside the hot springs: thin tansan-senbei crackers baked on iron molds since the Meiji era, tansan-manjū steamed buns, and a sharp local cider sometimes called teppō-mizu. The hill bamboo from Rokkō becomes Arima-kago woven baskets. None of these need refrigeration, all of them travel well, and all of them are sold along the same fifteen-minute walk between the two bathhouses.