Iizaka Onsen

Bashō slept here, badly

Iizaka sits on the Surikami River in the northern outskirts of Fukushima city, a short ride on the Fukushima Kōtsū Iizaka Line out of Fukushima Station. The local chronicle traces bathing here to the era of Yamato Takeru, who is said to have soaked away an illness in a spring called Saba-ko no Yu. The town's literary calling card came later, in the summer of 1689, when Matsuo Bashō passed through on the journey recorded as Oku no Hosomichi. Bashō's own page is wry rather than fond: rain fell, fleas and mosquitoes worked the thin lodging, and he left at first light. The visit still anchors the place. Iizaka counts itself, with Naruko and Akiu across the Ōu range, among the three named hot springs of old Mutsu, and its public-bath culture has been called the local equivalent of Dōgo and Arima for length of unbroken use.

The center of that culture is Saba-yu (鯖湖湯), a small dark-timbered bathhouse rebuilt in 1993 to the lines of an 1889 Meiji-era predecessor once described as Japan's first wooden public bath of the modern period. The new building is faithful to the old one, slate roof and clean cypress benches, and a soak still costs about two hundred yen.

Nine sotoyu on a small river

The town is compact and easy to walk. Ryokan line both sides of the Surikami, the bridges short and low to the water, and nine public baths still operate among them on a rotating weekly schedule. The names read like a directory of old neighborhood landmarks: Saba-yu, Hakō-yu, Dōsen-no-yu, Senki-no-yu, Daimon-no-yu. The water runs hot in the local style, the entry rituals are quiet, and the rooms are unadorned. A guest who buys a small towel and a hundred-yen coin can follow one bath to the next on foot in an afternoon.

Iizaka gyōza, peach valley, dawn cherry

The kitchen leans on a single specialty: Iizaka gyōza, dumplings arranged in a tight circle and pan-fried into a shared disc, eaten with beer at small counters near the station. In early spring Akatsuki-zakura, the local dawn cherry, lights the riverbanks. A few weeks later the Asagiri Bridge carries walkers across to Hanamomo no Sato, a small valley planted with several hundred peach trees in dozens of varieties that bloom together for two short weeks in April.