Ginzan Onsen

From silver shaft to bathing town

The name belongs to the Nobesawa silver mine, discovered in 1456 in the hills above what is now Obanazawa and worked at full tilt through the early Edo period as one of Japan's great shogunate-controlled lodes. As the silver thinned out after the mid-17th century the miners drifted away, and the workings left behind were quietly inherited by the hot springs they had cut into while digging. For two centuries the valley was a modest tōji settlement of thatched cottages and small inns, until a flood on the Ginzan River in 1913 swept most of those buildings away. Recovery was slow, helped along first by a small hydroelectric station in the early 1920s and then, decisively, by a 1926 bore that finally brought up hot water in volume. The inns rebuilt themselves in the modern manner of the moment: three- and four-storey timber-framed houses with deep wooden balconies, white plaster panels, and ornamental kote-e relief on the upper walls. Most of what stands along the river today dates to that Taishō-into-early-Shōwa rebuild, preserved since 1986 under a local townscape ordinance.

Gas lamps over the river

The town is essentially one short street, folded along both banks of the Ginzan and stitched together by stone bridges. Cars stop at the edge; the central lane belongs to people in yukata and geta. At dusk the gas lamps come on along the walkways and the upper-storey lattices, and the river runs gold between the rows of wooden balconies, which is the picture that has put Ginzan on so many lists of Japan's prettiest onsen towns. Winters here are heavy, with the inn eaves carrying real weight of snow from late December through February, and the lit facades reading even more theatrically against a white street.

After Oshin

National recognition arrived through television. The 1983 NHK morning drama Oshin, set partly in the snows of Yamagata, used Ginzan as a stand-in for the heroine's home valley and pulled a generation of viewers up the prefecture road for the first time. The town has been a domestic pilgrimage site ever since, and the preservation rules in place by the mid-1980s ensured the visitors found something close to what the screen had promised.