Higashiyama Onsen

Gyōki, a three-legged crow, and twelve centuries of bathing

Tradition places the discovery of Higashiyama in the Tenpyō era of the eighth century, when the wandering priest Gyōki is said to have been led to the source by a three-legged crow. Whatever the truth of the legend, the spring was running long before the town of Aizu existed around it. By the Edo period it had been designated the official bathing ground of the Aizu domain, a quiet valley where retainers of the Matsudaira clan came to convalesce. It is counted, with Kaminoyama and Yunohama in Yamagata, as one of the three classic hot springs of the Ōu region (奥羽三楽郷).

The valley sits a short ride from Tsuruga-jō, the castle whose month-long siege in autumn 1868 ended the Aizu clan's stand in the Boshin War. The same conflict drove the teenage Byakkotai to their ritual suicide on Iimoriyama, in sight of the burning castle town. Higashiyama was close enough to feel the war: the Shinsengumi commander Hijikata Toshizō is said to have stopped here to recover from wounds, and the painter Takehisa Yumeji and poet Yosano Akiko later came for longer stays. The samurai memory has not faded from the streetscape.

A narrow valley of wooden inns

The town runs east from the castle along the Yu river, a thin gorge tight enough that the inns line up wall to wall above the water. Several of them are pre-war wooden buildings; Mukaitaki, founded in the seventeenth century, is a Registered Tangible Cultural Property and still operates its original baths. The water comes out at 45–58°C, classified as calcium-sodium sulfate-chloride with simple-spring veins mixed in, and flows at roughly 1,500 litres per minute. Most houses run both indoor cypress baths and small open-air pools facing the river.

The Aizu-Wakamatsu side of the valley keeps a working geisha district — the karari-gisan of Higashiyama still perform parlour dances in the larger inns, one of the few places in Tōhoku where the tradition survived the postwar slump.

What to do above the valley

Tsuruga-jō is fifteen minutes by car, rebuilt in 1965 with its distinctive red-tile roof and a thorough museum on the Aizu clan and the Boshin War. Iimoriyama, with the Byakkotai memorial and the hexagonal Sazae-dō pagoda, is on the way back. The old castle town is also Japan's senior centre for lacquerware (Aizu-nuri) and a strong sake region; the Suehiro and Tsurunoe breweries run free tours within walking distance of the station.