Yunokawa Onsen

A woodcutter, a sick heir, and the lord of Matsumae

Local legend places the discovery in 1453, when a woodcutter is said to have soothed an injured arm in a spring welling out near the river mouth. He carved a small Yakushi Buddha and built a hut beside the water, and that shrine is the ancestor of today's Yukura Jinja. The documented history starts two centuries later, in 1653, when the young heir of the Matsumae clan, then suffering a wasting illness, was brought here on the advice of a dream. He recovered within days, and the clan repaid the shrine with a golden Yakushi image and a bronze gong cast from Shiriuchi ore. From that point Yunokawa was a recognised cure for the lords of southern Hokkaido. The place-name itself is older still: Ainu yu-pet, the river of hot water.

The town we know is largely a Showa-era creation. As Hakodate boomed on the northern fisheries, Yunokawa became the city's bath quarter, its inner room, a strip of inns laid along the shore east of the centre and tied to it by the Hakodate streetcar. The tram still runs, and its line still terminates at Yunokawa Onsen stop, almost a century later.

Sea-facing inns and a bath of monkeys

The water arrives hot and salty. Yunokawa's springs come up around 60 to 65°C and carry enough chloride to taste, classed as a sodium-calcium chloride spring that keeps the body warm long after the bath. Inns line the foreshore, so a corner room at the right elevation gives you the Tsugaru Strait through the steam. A free public footbath, the Yumeguri Butai, sits beside the tram stop for travellers who only have an hour.

The signature winter scene is at the Hakodate Tropical Botanical Garden, where a troop of Japanese macaques have been let into a heated open-air pool every season since 1970. From December through early May the Yunokawa-zaru sit shoulder-deep in onsen water, eyes half-closed, while snow falls on the palms behind them. Hakodate Airport is five minutes by car from the inns, which is the resort's other quiet boast.

Around the bay

Most visitors pair the bath with the rest of Hakodate: the night view from Mt. Hakodate, the dawn Asaichi seafood market by the station, the star-shaped earthworks of Goryōkaku. The tram threads all of it together, and the last car back to Yunokawa is rarely empty.