Amami Onsen Nanten-en

The main building here was never meant to be an inn. The firm of Tatsuno Kingo, the architect behind Tokyo Station and the Bank of Japan head office, designed it in 1913 as the family bathhouse of the Shioyu (潮湯) seaside bathing resort at Ohama in Sakai: a rare piece of Japanese-style work from a man known for Western architecture. After the 1934 Muroto typhoon wrecked the resort, the building was moved inland to Amami in 1935, and it opened as the ryokan Nanten-en in 1949. It has been a registered national tangible cultural property since 2003. The water is a cold, weakly radioactive spring, what the inn calls a natural radium spring, with one large bath each for men and women. Around the house sits a garden of roughly 3,000 tsubo with the Kongo and Katsuragi mountains behind it, and one detached room, Seiryutei (清流亭), has its own open-air bath fed straight from the source, facing the Amami river.