Itō Onsen

A shipyard, a bath town, a wooden inn

Itō's first chapter as a town worth crossing a country for begins not with a bath but with a keel. In 1604 the English navigator William Adams, by then sworn to Tokugawa Ieyasu under the name Miura Anjin, was ordered to build Japan's first Western-rigged sailing ships on the steep, deep banks at the mouth of the Matsukawa. The 80-ton vessel and the larger San Buena Ventura that followed put the harbour on the shogunate's map, and the town has kept Anjin's name in its streets ever since.

Through the Edo period the cluster of farming and fishing hamlets around the river quietly turned into a bathhouse town, channelling spring water to communal tubs serving travellers and the Tokugawa house itself. The railway from 1938 turned trickle into flood, and the wooden ryokan culture of the late Taishō and early Shōwa took its definitive form along the river. Tōkaikan, opened in 1928, is the surviving emblem: three storeys of cypress and cedar, each floor reportedly built by a different master carpenter as a quiet competition, topped by a 1949 lookout tower. It closed as an inn in 1997 and now stands as a public museum where the baths still fill on weekends.

The eastern Izu coast

The town faces Sagami Bay from the eastern flank of the Izu peninsula, and the geology is generous: more than seven hundred sources push out warm, faintly saline water, ranking Itō among the highest-yielding onsen districts in the country. Most of the old quarter is walkable along the Matsukawa promenade, lined with palms and stone lanterns and threaded between Tōkaikan and the morning fish market on the harbour. Kinmedai, the deep-red golden-eye snapper pulled from waters just offshore, is the dish everyone remembers, usually simmered whole in sweet soy or sliced thin over rice.

A short ride south, the Jōgasaki coast offers a different register: black basalt cliffs from a 4,000-year-old eruption of Ōmuroyama, a suspension bridge slung over the surf, and a ten-kilometre clifftop trail. Cyclists use Izu-Kōgen station as a base for longer loops down the peninsula, returning to Itō for a soak before the trains thin out.