Manganji Onsen

A temple, and seven hundred years

Manganji takes its name from the temple at its heart. After the first Mongol invasion of 1274, the shogunate's commissioner for Kyushu, Hojo Tokisada, founded Manganji here to pray for the safety of the realm; the temple still holds nationally designated treasures, including portraits of Tokisada and of Hojo Tokimune. The hot spring grew up around it as lodging for temple visitors, and the hamlet is usually described as carrying some seven hundred years of history. In 1964 it was named a National Health Resort alongside Kurokawa and Tanoharu. It is the most storied of the five Minami-Oguni springs, and the most unpretentiously rural.

The kawayu

The signature here is the kawayu: a simple stone-walled open-air bath built directly into the bed of the Shigase River, where the spring wells up through the river floor. Its surface sits at almost exactly the level of the river and the road beside it, so while you soak, houses and passing cars are above your eye line and the bath is fully open to view, which has earned it the nickname of "Japan's most courage-requiring onsen." There is an unmanned changing room and an honor box for the bathing fee. The warm water is woven into daily life: residents still use the river beside it to rinse rice, wash vegetables, and do laundry, and at dawn steam drifts off the water.

Baths and inns

The hamlet keeps three communal baths: the indoor Manganji Onsen-kan, the riverside kawayu, and the Kamiyu a hundred metres upstream. The spring is an alkaline simple water of around 44°C, with bicarbonate-type sources elsewhere in the hamlet, good for rheumatism, neuralgia, and fatigue. The best-known inn is Ryokan Fujimoto, up in the Oku-Manganji pocket: an all-wood Oguni-cedar building with its own riverside baths and several free-use private open-air baths. Nearby stand Meoto Falls and a thousand-year-old giant zelkova.