Naruko Onsen-kyo

A thousand years in the Ōu mountains

Naruko sits in the upper reaches of the Eai River in northern Miyagi, where the chronicle Shoku Nihon Kōki records a sudden eruption at Mount Toriyama in 837 CE that left behind a roaring spring. The name Naruko (鳴子, "the place that cries out") is folk-etymologically tied to that birth. The poet Matsuo Bashō passed through in 1689 on the journey that became Oku no Hosomichi, crossing the old Shitomae barrier and noting the "Naruko no Yu" in his account. Minamoto no Yoshitsune is said to have rested here on his flight north toward Hiraizumi.

The modern resort is an umbrella name for five villages, each with its own water and its own character: Naruko at the rail terminus, Higashi-Naruko with its old riverside inns, Kawatabi (the oldest of the five, long prescribed for beriberi), Nakayamadaira along the Ōtani River, and Onikōbe spread across the highlands of Kurikoma. Around 400 springs feed them in total.

One valley, nearly every water

Japan classifies hot-spring waters into eleven chemical types, and Naruko is routinely cited as having nine of them within a single valley, a concentration few resorts in the country can match. The result is that moving between bathhouses is also moving between waters: milky sulfur at Taki-no-Yu, the silky "eel water" of Nakayamadaira, the iron-tinged springs of Higashi-Naruko, the bicarbonate baths of Kawatabi.

The town keeps the old wooden architecture intact. Taki-no-Yu, the public bathhouse at the foot of the Onsen Shrine approach, is the emblematic one: a small dark-timber building drawing the shrine's source, walls and floors black with mineral wear. The surrounding mountains are beech and maple, and in mid-October the cliffs of Naruko Gorge (鳴子峡), carved a hundred meters deep by the Ōtani River, turn into one of the most photographed foliage corridors in Tōhoku.

Wood, water, and small dolls

Naruko is one of the historic centers of kokeshi — the slender wooden dolls turned on a lathe by the kijishi woodworkers of the northeast. The local style has a large round head, a slim waist, chrysanthemum-painted body, and a head joined so that turning it produces a soft squeak, unmistakable once you have heard it. Around eighty artisans still work full-time in town. Every September the All-Japan Kokeshi Festival gathers makers and collectors from across the country, with a dedication ceremony at the Onsen Shrine.