Oku-Nikkō Yumoto Onsen

A spring discovered by the founder of Nikko

Yumoto's history begins in 788, when the priest Shōdō Shōnin, founder of Nikko's mountain Buddhism and of what became Rinnō-ji, climbed into the upper valley and found the steaming source on the far shore of Lake Yunoko. He enshrined Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddha of Healing, beside the water and named the place Yakushi-yu. The temple he built that year, Onsen-ji (一山一寺, "one mountain, one temple"), still stands above the source and still operates a small wooden bathhouse, the Yakushi-yu, where pilgrims and ordinary visitors can soak in the company of the bodhisattvas. During the Edo period the Tokugawa shogunate placed the springs under the watch of appointed yumamori and opened the first proper inns; in 1954 the Ministry of Health and Welfare designated Yumoto one of the country's first three National Health Resorts (国民保養温泉地), together with Shima in Gunma and Sukayu in Aomori, founding the system itself.

Lake, sulfur, and snow at 1,500 metres

The village sits at about 1,500 metres inside Nikko National Park, strung along the northern shore of Lake Yunoko, with Mt. Nantai rising to the south. The sources lie in the Yunodaira marsh just behind the inns: small roofed wells where milky white, strongly sulfurous water bubbles directly out of the wetland and is piped from there to every ryokan in the village (and on to Kotoku and Chūzenji onsen below). The water runs hot, somewhere between the high forties and high seventies Celsius, slightly acidic, with a clean hydrogen-sulfide bite that hangs in the air around the bath wings. Summers are cool and short. Winters are long and deeply snowed-in, the road walled in by ploughed drifts well past the equinox.

Out the door

From the lake's southern end the Yukawa River drops seventy metres over Yudaki Falls and enters the great Senjōgahara wetland, a flat ramsar-listed plateau crossed by a wooden boardwalk that ends at Ryūzu Falls on the shore of Lake Chūzenji. The Iroha-zaka switchbacks then run down toward Nikko town and the Tōshōgū World Heritage shrines, the same axis Shōdō walked twelve centuries ago.