Yugawara Onsen

The only onsen in the Man'yōshū

Yugawara is the single hot spring named in the Man'yōshū, the eighth-century poetry anthology that defined classical Japan's poetic taste. The relevant verse opens with the words "ashigara no toi no kahara ni izuru yu no…" — "the water that rises in Toi-no-kahara of Ashigara" — fixing the valley as a named hot-spring site more than twelve centuries ago. From the Meiji period on, the same valley drew a long roster of writers in search of quiet rooms with a desk. Natsume Sōseki wrote here while working on his last, unfinished novel Meian (Light and Darkness), breaking off in a Yugawara ryokan in 1916. Kunikida Doppo, Shimazaki Tōson, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Yosano Akiko all stayed and worked here, and roughly thirty stone monuments along the path through Manyō-kōen (Man'yō Park) carry verses composed on those visits.

A river valley between Atami and Hakone

Geographically Yugawara sits between two louder neighbours — Atami on the coast and Hakone on the ridge — and the comparison is what locals themselves draw. The town stretches along the Fujiki River as it cuts down a calm valley off the southern flank of the Hakone volcano, and most of the inns are spread thinly along the banks rather than stacked into a single strip. The water comes out of the ground at a moderate 30 to 88 °C and runs to simple, weak saline and gypsum chemistries: easy to sit in for a long bath, gentle on the skin, free of the sulphur signature of the bigger mountain resorts. The lodgings skew toward mid-size ryokan rather than mega-hotels, and the public soaking life is held together by Yugawara Soyu and by the long footbath at Dokuho no Yu inside Manyō Park.

Around the valley

In mid-February through early March the slopes of Makuyama above the town turn red and white as around four thousand plum trees bloom for the Ume no Utage festival — one of the larger plum events near Tokyo, set on a hillside that doubled for the medieval Ishibashiyama battlefield in the 1180 Genji rising. Further up the valley a tributary of the Fujiki drops over the fifteen-metre Fudō-taki waterfall, with a small Fudō-myōō shrine at its base. Hakone's outer ring is half an hour up the road by bus.