Story and photos by Carol Canter, except as noted.
Feature image: Bathhouse at Tsuta Onsen. (Photo courtesy of Tsuta Onsen.)
I took my first communal women’s bath in Japan’s Aomori Prefecture, nearly 500 miles north of Tokyo and far from English-speaking guidance. Standing at the entrance to the bath, I observed for several minutes, trying to appear inconspicuous as the only foreigner. I watched women of all ages kneel on the floor in front of taps in this large, beechwood barn-like room with a steaming bath the size of a small swimming pool. Each woman was using a colorful plastic bucket to pour hot water from the tap or bath over her body, which was lathered with soap and scrubbed with a tiny towel provided by the inn. Shampooing, shaving, tweezing — all the variations on women’s toilette were performed outside the tub. Only when they were perfectly washed and clean would the women submerge their bodies into the steaming bath, soaking up the therapeutic mineral waters for which the area is famed.
Tsuta Onsen was the place, a natural hot spring spa resort nestled in the Hakkoda Mountains near the northern tip of Honshu, Japan’s main island. It was my introduction not only to the Japanese spa, but to Japan’s Tohoku region, replete with scenic wonders, friendly country folk, and few foreign tourists. It had been the promise of a Japan where tradition is strong and the beauty vibrant that had prompted us to choose Tohoku as the area to explore by car for 17 days. Comprising the six northernmost prefectures of Honshu, Tohoku offers regional folk crafts, exquisitely-restored feudal towns, picturesque fishing and farming communities, forested mountain onsen (spa resorts), and historic temples and mountain-top shrines to which sacred pilgrimages are all made annually. Here is an outpost where one can escape the urban madness of Tokyo and try out pioneering instincts in a land with few deluxe Western-style hotels or English speakers to serve as buffers to a truly foreign culture.
Zigzagging across Tohoku, one finds traditional accommodation like minshuku, the Japanese version of a bed and breakfast inn, and its more deluxe counterpart, the ryokan, as well as the more or less Western-style business hotel in larger cities. There are brilliant blue volcanic lakes to boat across or bathe in, and spectacular national parks through which to drive, camp, hike or picnic. Restorative stops at four or five different onsen can make a Tohoku journey the perfect blend of restful and active, healthy, educational, and positively inspiring.
Tsuta Onsen was a fine place to begin this “R and R” after a long, eight-hour drive from Tokyo, due north to the city of Morioka the preceding day. Once past the congestion of Tokyo and its broad outskirts, driving was a breeze along the Tohoku Expressway. From Morioka to Tsuta Onsen, the scenery turned ever more meditative as we passed through apple country, skirted Lake Towada, rich blue in its volcanic depth, then edged along the Oirase Gorge, with late afternoon light filtering through the trees. Here, lovers strolled along rushing streams and posed for photos in front of cascading waterfalls while families picnicked and children played.
At Tsuta, we exchanged shoes for slippers and padded up some 250 stairs, along the inn’s highly-polished floors and red-carpeted hallways to our room. Here we spent two nights sleeping on a futon, the Japanese folding mattress, unfolded each night onto the tatami-matted floors.
The delicious food, a day at Lake Towada, evening walks on the trails surrounding the century-old inn, and repeated soaks in the beechwood bath purged our bodies of the long overseas flight, and readied us for the further delights Tohoku had in store.
The next day, the 140 miles to Kakunodate were delightful. We crossed the steep mountain passes of Towada Hachimantai National Park (one of three national and many more quasi-national parks in Tohoku) to Lake Tazawa, Japan’s deepest lake, for a swim, then passed large flat expanses of rice fields, mellow in the late golden light beneath thickly pine-clad mountains. The peaceful country beauty was but an introduction to the magical world of Kakunodate, entered through its 200-year-old samurai district, Uchi-machi.
This part of town is lovely to stroll along streets lined and shaded by huge, weeping cherry trees and high fences through which you glimpse impressive homes once belonging to the samurai class. Several of these have been turned into museums with gardens and memorabilia available for exploration. There are also beautiful craft shops featuring products made from cherry bark, a lustrous dark wood flecked with white. Cherry bark craft, or kabazaiku was introduced to Kakunodate as a cottage industry to help support lower-ranking samurai as the feudal clan system was on the wane. Today, local craftsmen demonstrate their skills in several shops and at the Denshokan, a modern museum, with displays of local history and crafts and cultural performances which take place outside, in a courtyard.
Just an hour’s drive from Kakunodate is Tazawako Kogen Plateau. Nearby is Nyuto Onsen, a picturesque free-form cluster of outdoor baths and thatched-roof buildings nestled in the mountains. We walked down a winding pathway, passing people who were actually cooking eggs in the boiling sulphuric pools. Small buildings, with one side open to the outdoors, enclose either hot pools or showers from which the mineral waters continuously run. We walked over patches of ground literally boiling underfoot, crossed bridges and found many lovely private pools, eventually choosing a very hot outdoor pool set near a cool rushing stream. The afternoon was effortlessly whiled away between pool and stream, before heading back to Morioka for a taste of city life and a night in a business hotel.
In Morioka, you begin to understand what folk art is all about, its utilitarian origins, even the colorful toys and dolls once imbued with magical powers and created for healing and purification. These objects, whether pots for salting herring, sake jars or tea kettles, weren’t created as “art,” yet the beauty and simplicity of their form, the natural materials used and the decorative patterns sometimes added make them sought after today by souvenir hunters and collectors alike.
The heavy iron hot water kettles that hang suspended over the fireplaces in many of the region’s farmhouses are still wrought in traditional designs at the Iwachu factory in Morioka. The showroom hosts thousands of visitors who shop for kettles, furniture designed with cast iron fittings, or smaller wind chimes and trivets. The iron kettles used to heat sake are more portable than the hot water kettles, so they make attractive souvenirs.
From Morioka, the road due east leads to the harbor town of Miyako and Jodogahama Beach, where steep pine-covered cliffs shelter a long, white-sand swimming beach.
Here, bathers swim among eroded fingers of limestone that jut out into the sea. We picnicked on sweet corn on the cob that a farm woman had given us on a street in Morioka, as we watched an older couple harvest seaweed. Then we drove south along the coast, known as Rikuchi-Kaigan National Park, past fishing villages where men were weaving brightly colored fishing nets as boats pulled in with their fresh catches.
From the coast we headed inland to the farm country around Tono, where patchwork fields of tobacco and rice gleamed in varying shades of green. This is the land of margaritas, or thatched-roof L-shaped farmhouses. The family lives in the long part of the L, while the animals stay in the short end. We lost all sense of time in Tono, watching farmers work the tobacco fields, exploring a stone phallic shrine on a remote country road, and swimming in a creek with some young local boys. Though we got lost trying to find several points of interest, each wrong turn put us on an ever more beautiful road.
From the fertile Tono Basin we proceeded to Chusonji Temple of Hiraizumi, a mountaintop complex of temples and shrines built by the powerful Fujiwara clan in the early 12th century. Here, in a tall grove of cryptomeria trees, is a restoration of what was once the political and cultural center of the region, the “Mirror of Kyoto Culture.” There are two of the original buildings, including the main attraction of the complex, the Konjikido or Golden Hall. This Japanese National Treasure is a dazzling monument in gold leaf, lacquer and inlaid mother of pearl to what was known as Hiraizumi’s extravagant Culture of Gold. The complex also includes a Noh Theatre and the main Chusonji Temple among the more than 10 buildings in this beautiful rustic setting.
A peaceful inn behind the temple serves delicious vegetarian fare. It offers a convenient and appropriate ambience from which to take in this impressive complex, highlighted by a magical nighttime stroll through the cryptomeria forest.
Two more onsen, Narugo and Sakunami, rounded off our Tohoku wanderings by giving us a taste of a more or less typical Japanese spa resort. Historically, these onsen have drawn local people, especially farmers, for their medicinal effects, as well as for relaxation. Since Tohoku is the agricultural belt of Japan, many of the region’s farmers would spend their post-harvest slack season at the thermal baths. They would stay at the spa village, which had at its center a public hot spring bath house where people gathered from the nearby inns for bathing in the mineral waters. These visitors would stay at the spa for a week or 10 days, often bringing along their own food.
Subsequently, many spas have become pleasure resorts, with entertainment, gambling and a plethora of hotels and ryokan to support this role. They have also become overnight stops along tourist routes leading travelers between places of scenic beauty and historical temples and shrines. A sense of the role of the onsen, both historic and modern, can be observed in Sakunami, at the wonderful rock bath at Iwamatsu ryokan, the only mixed bath I experienced in Japan.
After descending over 100 steps dressed in a yukata (the cotton kimono provided at each Japanese inn) and slippers, stopping at various landings to view the stream and mountains outside, one arrives at a series of rock pools ranging in temperature from deliciously warm to burning hot.
The steamy, atmospheric baths are enclosed with roof and rock wall on one side while the other side opens onto the stream and a steep forested mountainside beyond. Come nightfall, the soft lights give the baths a dreamy quality, perfect to ready body and spirit for sleep.
You bathe among a mix of men, women, and children; some are tourists there for a relaxing adventure; others are local country folk taking the curative waters. It’s a fascinating and rare glimpse of old and new Japan side by side in the bath. New Japan can be recognized among the modest, urban women wearing bathing suits to this, their first mixed bath, while the older, sturdy country women seem completely at ease bathing unclad as their people have done for centuries.
Iwamatsu also offers the regular sex-segregated indoor tile baths as well as a large, warm swimming pool. In addition, each room has its own private deep tiled tub where guests can run their own mineral bath.
Narugo is known not only for its thermal waters but also as one of 10 kokeshi-production centers in Tohoku. The town is lively with workshops lining the main street. Here too is Kokeshi Dori, where you can watch some 70 craftsmen create these limbless dolls with large heads on cylindrical bodies.
Narugo kokeshi are distinctive for the squeak made when the head is turned, the sound like the cry of a bird. Their bodies are concave and sport a red, sometimes grey, chrysanthemum design, while in other towns, kokeshi bodies are painted with stripes, kimonos, or other abstract or floral designs.
Narugo is also known for its public bathhouse, Takinoyu, though each individual hotel and inn offers its own baths. Takinoyu has a wonderful flavor, its open wooden pipes filling the cypress tubs with steaming water from an outside spring where people have bathed since 837 A.D. It wasn’t until I sought out the public baths, which took me up Narugo’s backstreets, that I felt the full impact of Narugo as an onsen town — the steaming vents in the sidewalks, the smell of sulphur, people walking around the streets in their yukata and geta, a Japanese sandal. A bath at Takinoyu is supposed to be good for the stomach, nerves, joints, and skin, but I frankly found soaking my way across Tohoku to be good for each and every organ — including my soul.
IF YOU GO: Visit the excellent Japan Travel website at https://www.japan.travel/en/destinations/tohoku/ (Versions of this story have appeared in the San Francisco Examiner and Sawasdee, the in-flight magazine of Thai Airways.)
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