Okuhida Onsen-go

Five villages on the back road to the Hotaka

Okuhida Onsen-go is a string of five hot-spring villages climbing the Gifu side of the Northern Alps, strung along the road that crosses Abō Pass before dropping into Nagano. From low to high the villages are Hirayu, Fukuji, Shin-Hirayu, Tochio, and Shinhotaka, each sitting between roughly 800 and 1,300 metres, each fed by its own sources, each with its own register. Hirayu is the oldest by a wide margin. Local tradition dates its discovery to 1564, when a detachment of Takeda Shingen's army crossing Hirayu Pass into Hida was laid low by fatigue and the sulphurous fog of Mt. Iōdake; a white monkey is said to have led the surviving soldiers to a hot spring at the foot of the pass, where bathing restored them. The white monkey is still the mascot of the Enman Festival held in Hirayu each summer.

More rotenburo than anywhere else in Japan

The area is, by a comfortable margin, the densest concentration of outdoor rotenburo in the country: well over a hundred open-air baths are distributed across the five villages, and most of the ryokan are oriented so their tubs look directly at the 3,000-metre wall of the Hotaka range. With roughly 37,000 litres of hot water gushing per minute the discharge volume ranks third nationally, and the average source temperature sits above 60°C, which is why so many of the baths can be kakenagashi (free-flowing) even through the deep winter. And the winter is deep: Okuhida receives heavy snowfall from December through March, and bathing outside while the snow comes down on the bath's roof is the defining Okuhida image.

Up the ropeway, out to Kamikōchi

From Shinhotaka, the highest of the five villages, the Shinhotaka Ropeway climbs in two stages to a viewing deck at 2,156 m on the shoulder of Nishi-Hotakaguchi — one of the most accessible alpine panoramas in Japan, looking straight across at Yari-ga-take and the main Hotaka ridge. Hirayu sits at the mouth of the road over Abō Pass, which is the back door into Kamikōchi, Japan's most famous high-alpine valley (closed to private cars; shuttle buses run from Hirayu Bus Terminal in green season). Closer to the villages are Hirayu Falls, a 64-metre cascade ten minutes' walk from the bus terminal, and Hirayu no Mori, the town's large public bathhouse where sixteen open-air tubs are scattered through a forest plot.