Kinugawa Onsen

From a domain bath to a Meiji resort

Kinugawa's recorded story begins in Genroku 4 (1691), when villagers led by Numao Shigobei found a spring on the right bank of the Kinugawa River and named it Taki Onsen, the "waterfall spring." From 1751 the bath fell under the jurisdiction of the Nikkō magistrate, which closed it to the public for the rest of the Edo period: only feudal lords, samurai of their entourage, and high-ranking monks returning from pilgrimage to the Tōshōgū were permitted to bathe. The temple and shrine landholdings were dissolved after the Meiji Restoration, and in 1869 the spring opened to ordinary travellers. A second source, Fujiwara Onsen, was developed on the opposite bank in the early Meiji years, and in 1927 the two were merged under the present name, Kinugawa Onsen. The opening of what is now the Tōbu Kinugawa Line two years later turned the valley into one of Kantō's standard weekend cures.

A gorge town stacked on the cliff

The resort sits in the deep ravine the Kinugawa has cut through the southern edge of the Aizu uplift. Ryokan and concrete hotels rise in tiers along both walls of the canyon, and the better rooms open straight onto the rapids, with outdoor baths cantilevered out over the drop. The water is an alkaline simple spring, near-neutral and almost odourless, easy on the skin and on long soaks. A footnote of the late-Showa tourism collapse is also part of the present landscape: several ferro-concrete hotels along the river were shuttered after the bubble burst and never demolished, and the cluster visible downstream from Takimi-bashi has become an unintended landmark in its own right, drawing a small steady audience of urban-exploration photographers.

Day-trip range

Kinugawa is close enough to Tokyo that many people come and go on the same day: the Tōbu line runs limited expresses from Asakusa in about two hours, and the Spacia X continues to Kinugawa Onsen Station at the centre of the resort. Around the valley sit Edo Wonderland (Nikkō Edomura), a working-set theme park reconstructing an Edo-period town, and a section of the Kinugawa run as a river-boat course through the gorge, both within a short bus or taxi ride.