Kaga Onsen-go

A four-onsen alliance under the Maeda

What Japanese travel writers call Kaga Onsen-go is not one town but an alliance of four — Yamanaka, Yamashiro, Katayamazu, and Awazu — scattered between Komatsu and the Fukui border. Each was opened independently, and each carries its own founding story, but they share a chronology that runs back more than 1,300 years and a long period of patronage under the Maeda clan of the Kaga domain. Awazu, by the legend recorded at Hōshi Ryokan, was opened by the monk Taichō in 718 during the Nara period, which makes it one of the oldest documented hot springs in Japan. Yamashiro is credited to the monk Gyōki, who is said to have noticed crows soothing their wounds in the water; Yamanaka counts a similarly long lineage in the Kakusenkei gorge. The most famous visitor in the literary record is Matsuo Bashō, who stayed eight nights at Yamanaka on the journey that became Oku no Hosomichi and ranked its waters among the finest he knew.

Four villages, four very different rooms

Geography keeps the four onsen distinct even though they sit within an eight-kilometre radius. Yamanaka lies upstream in a wooded gorge along the Daishōji River, with riverside platforms set out from spring through autumn. Yamashiro is built around the imperial bathhouse Sōyu and the Meiji-era Kosōyu, and around the rebirth of Kutani porcelain: the painter and gourmet Kitaōji Rosanjin stayed at Iroha Sōan in 1915 and learned the kiln from Suda Seika, and the cottage is preserved much as he left it. Katayamazu stands on the shore of Lake Shibayama, a freshwater lake whose surface, locals say, changes colour seven times a day; from late October to early March, tundra swans winter on the water. Awazu, inland from Komatsu, is the quiet one — and home to Hōshi Ryokan, owned and run by the same family for forty-six generations and long recognised by Guinness as one of the oldest continuously operated lodgings on earth.

Getting there now

The Hokuriku Shinkansen extension opened on March 16, 2024, running through to Tsuruga with a stop at Kaga Onsen station — the old limited-express hub for the four towns is now a bullet-train stop, and Tokyo is roughly three hours away. Komatsu Airport sits just north of Awazu for the Tokyo-Haneda corridor and a handful of international routes. The four onsen run shuttle and bus connections from Kaga Onsen station; a car is the easiest way to taste more than one of them in a single trip.