Ryokan Ohnuma

Ryokan Ohnuma is built around bathing: eight baths in all, fed by two springs, the inn's own and a shared local source, kept flowing straight from the source rather than recirculated. The big mixed-bathing hall, Yakushi Sennin-buro (薬師千人風呂), has women-only hours and a wall painted with a mural of heavenly maidens. A separate women-only bath, Tennyo-buro (天女風呂), draws on the inn's oldest spring, a faintly tea-colored, silky water with a woody scent that's long been known locally for how soft it leaves the skin. Smaller private baths sit around the building: one sets medicinal stones and quartz into the tub with trains passing just outside, another catches the morning sun with charcoal and rose quartz worked into the water, and a small one-person bath, Akari-no-yu (灯りの湯), runs on the same house spring. A stone-lined bath from the Taisho era sits in a courtyard and closes for winter, and one room does away with water bathing altogether, an aromatic, clothed room warmed by spring water running beneath the floor. The eighth, and best-known, is Mori-no-yu (母里の湯), a reservation-only private open-air bath set apart in the inn's garden up the hill, reached by a short walk or a shuttle, with no soap or shampoo allowed so the water stays as it is. The inn has been doing this for well over a century, as a toji (湯治) retreat where people settle in for a few slow days rather than sightsee, and it belongs to the Nihon Hitou wo Mamoru Kai (日本秘湯を守る会), the association for Japan's quieter hot-spring inns. Guests describe it as rustic rather than polished, with attentive, old-fashioned hospitality and meals built around local rice and soybeans.