Kumenoyu

Kumenoyu is a small day-use bathhouse in Matsuyama's Kume neighborhood, close to Dogo Onsen. It has an indoor bath, a cypress-tub bath, an open-air bath, a cold plunge, and a sauna, along with three bedrock-bath rooms named for the sun, moon, and stars after the shrine next door. The spring water is smooth and faintly slippery on the skin, and it's used throughout the building, in the showers and cold bath as well as the tubs. There's also a reclining foot bath and a drinking fountain of spring water filtered through local stones. A neighborhood legend ties the spring to a great earthquake in the Ansei era: Dogo Onsen's own water is said to have stopped flowing that day, gushing out here instead near a nearby temple, until prayers sent it back to Dogo. Locals have bathed here ever since, and evenings can get crowded with regulars.