Kamogawa Onsen

Fishing village to Pacific resort

Kamogawa sits on the eastern side of the Bōsō peninsula in Chiba, opening straight onto the Pacific Ocean. For most of its recorded history the coast was a string of working fishing villages in old Awa Province, and commercial fishing across five active ports still anchors the local economy. The shift toward resort use came in the second half of the twentieth century: in 1958 the shoreline was folded into the Minami-Bōsō Quasi-National Park, and Kamogawa was elevated to city status in 1971. The onsen layer is younger again. A first sulfur cold mineral spring was tapped at Futomi in 1983, the central Kamogawa-kan struck its own source by deep drilling in 1998, and in April 2003 the lodgings without a well of their own pooled around a natural sulfur spring upstream of the Kaneyama River and opened it as Kamogawa Onsen Nagisa-no-yu, formally establishing the resort. The JR Sotobō line keeps the door open from Tokyo: limited expresses run straight through to Awa-Kamogawa in roughly two hours.

Surf-side rotenburo

The defining image of Kamogawa is the ocean-front rotenburo with the Pacific surf breaking in the foreground. Ryokan stretch in a thin line along the shore so that nearly every bath window faces open water, and the mild Bōsō climate, warm in winter and tempered in summer by the sea, keeps the outdoor baths in use year-round. The kitchen culture is inseparable from the bath culture: the Kamogawa fish market lands the day's catch a short walk from the inns, and dinner trays lean heavily on sashimi straight off the boats and, in season, on ise-ebi (spiny lobster) taken from the rocky coast.

Around the shore

A short ride south brings you to the Tai-no-Ura coast, a scenic shelf of sea cliffs facing Nin'emon Island, prized as a sunrise viewing point. Kamogawa Sea World, the city's large aquarium, sits on the beach a little north of the central onsen strip with its killer-whale and beluga programmes. Inland, the temple route up Mt. Kiyosumi (Seichō-ji), associated with the young Nichiren, climbs from the coast into the mountains of the southern Bōsō and pairs cleanly with a night at the baths.