Yoshino Onsen Motoyu

The two baths, one for men and one for women, are small and both indoors: a reddish, iron-tinged carbonated spring said to leave skin smooth and to keep you warm long after you get out. The men's bath faces a wide window onto a pond and the inn's Japanese garden; the women's side is lined with wood and stone, dim and more cave-like, fed by the same reddish water. A shared lounge with a free water dispenser is just down the stairs. The inn dates back about 300 years and sits on a wooded path above Yoshino Station, built into the mountain slope in the local Yoshino-date (吉野建て) style, with six tatami rooms (eight to twelve mats each) looking onto the garden. Ascetic monks training on nearby Mount Omine reportedly used the bath here under the guise of medical treatment, defying their own discipline, until officials shut the inn down; people kept coming anyway, and it became known as Yoshino's hidden bath. The novelist Shimazaki Toson stayed here in the spring of 1893 while nursing a broken heart, and his room is preserved as it was then. It's said to be the last onsen inn left in Yoshino.