Hanamaki Onsen-kyo

Old bath valleys, one young resort

Hanamaki Onsen-kyo is less a single resort than a long thread of bathing hamlets along the upper Toyosawa and Dai rivers, on the western edge of Hanamaki city in Iwate. The older settlements, Ōsawa, Dai, Namari, Shidotaira, Watari, all trace their lineages to the Heian or early Edo period. Ōsawa Onsen is the deepest of these, with a founding legend that attributes its discovery to the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro during the eastern campaigns of the early ninth century; the wooden self-catering wing Tōjiya, still in use, was built more than two hundred years ago, and the open mixed bath of Ōsawa-no-yu sits directly on the Toyosawa.

The youngest member of the family is the Hanamaki Onsen resort proper, opened in 1923 by the Morioka entrepreneur Kindaichi Kunishi, who piped water down from Dai Onsen and set out to build "the Takarazuka of Tōhoku", complete with hotels, a zoo, tennis courts and one of Japan's first night-lit ski runs. Hanamaki was also the home of the poet and children's-story writer Miyazawa Kenji (1896 to 1933), who knew several of the older baths intimately and was brought to Ōsawa as a child by his devout father for Buddhist study sessions.

Wood, tatami, rose garden

The character of the area splits cleanly. Up the valley, Ōsawa and Dai preserve the wooden inn culture of the Tōhoku tōji tradition, long-stay therapeutic bathing in self-catering wings, communal kitchens, thin futons, deep pH-9 alkaline water that turns the skin smooth. Namari is famous for Shirosaru-no-yu, a standing rock bath cut into the river floor and said to be the deepest self-flowing natural bath in Japan. The 1923 resort closer to the plain is a different register: four large hotels clustered around a five-thousand-tsubo rose garden of some 450 varieties that opened in 1960 on the site of a south-facing flowerbed Kenji himself had designed.

The climate is inland and cool. Winters bring heavy snow into the valley and the mountains stay white well into spring.

Iihatōbu, around the corner

Hanamaki city is the literary heart of Kenji's imagined Iihatōbu. The Miyazawa Kenji Memorial Museum sits on a hill above the town, and the nearby Ihatov-kan and the poet's old school grounds round out the pilgrimage. South across the hills lies Tōno, the folktale country recorded by Yanagita Kunio in Tōno Monogatari, an easy detour for anyone already drawn this far into rural Iwate.