Kawaji Onsen

Kawaji for cuts, Kinugawa for ailments

Kawaji is the quieter of two onsen towns tucked into the upper gorge of the Kinu river, in what is now the western edge of Nikkō City. It sits just a few kilometres above its noisier neighbour Kinugawa, at the V where the smaller Kawaji river runs in from the north. The local saying kizu wa Kawaji, yamai wa Kinugawa — Kawaji for cuts, Kinugawa for ailments — captures the two towns' division of labour and dates back to when both were tōji (long-stay healing) destinations on the road from Edo to Aizu. Kawaji's water is a clear, soft, slightly alkaline simple spring, mild enough that bathers could stay in it for hours, which is exactly what tōji travellers did. The discovery of the springs is conventionally placed in the late Heian period: a samurai of the Minamoto retinue, wounded on the road, is said to have followed the smell of sulfur down through the gorge and healed his sword-cut in the river.

A bath in the gorge

Kawaji's character is the gorge itself. Where Kinugawa spreads out along its broader stretch of river, Kawaji is pinched between two canyon walls, and its ryokan are stacked one above the other on the steep right bank, their wooden balconies hanging over the water. The historic Yakushi-no-yu rotenburo on the river bed survives in name only — most of the open-air baths once cut into the rocks were lost to the great Kanto floods, and the current free public bath stands a short walk above the bridge. The mainstay of the area now is the half-dozen multi-story ryokan along the river bend, several of them still family-run, with private rotenburo overlooking the canyon. The town in late autumn is at its best: the Kinu maples turn together with the higher beech and oak above, and the gorge fills with the dry red-orange light that the Kawaji ryokan windows multiply through their amber paper.

Above the Ryūōkyō

Just upstream, the Kinu cuts a five-kilometre stretch of columnar-andesite cliffs called the Ryūōkyō — the Dragon-King Gorge — with the most photographed walking path in this part of Tochigi. A loop from Ryūōkyō Station drops to a series of pools below the dragon-shaped basalt formations and climbs back up through cedar forest in about two hours. The same gorge holds the small Ikari and Kawaji dams, whose lakes are popular with summer kayakers. Kawaji's transport link is the Tōbu Aizu-Kinugawa line, which runs single-track up the valley from Kinugawa-Onsen Station and continues north to Aizu-Tajima and the Ōuchi-juku post town — useful for combining a night in the gorge with a winter detour into the snow country.