Namegawa Onsen Fukushimaya

Namegawa Onsen Fukushimaya is a single-inn hot spring standing at roughly 850 meters above sea level along the Maekawa gorge in the Azuma mountain range, in Yonezawa City, Yamagata Prefecture. It is counted among the Yonezawa Hatto, the eight hot springs of Yonezawa. Local tradition holds that the spring was discovered in 1476, when a village samurai named Saito Morifusa slipped on a rock while fording the river and felt warmth in the stone he grasped; the name Namegawa, meaning slippery river, comes from that episode. In 1763 Sasaki Masanao obtained permission from the Uesugi lords of the Yonezawa domain to open a therapeutic bathing lodge here, and the Fukushimaya family has kept the springs for fourteen generations since.

The water is classified as a sulfur-bearing sodium-calcium bicarbonate-sulfate spring, hypotonic and neutral. All three of the inn's private sources flow naturally without pumping, emerging between 40.4 and 53.6 degrees Celsius at a pH of around 7.0, with a yield of roughly 150 liters per minute. Nothing is added and nothing is recirculated: no water is mixed in, no heating is applied, and no chlorination or filtration is used, so the milky white to bluish-white water reaches the tubs exactly as it leaves the ground, carrying a clear scent of sulfur.

There are four bathing areas: a mixed-gender indoor bath, a women-only indoor bath, a mixed-gender rock-built open-air bath overlooking the Maekawa river, and a cypress open-air bath that can be reserved for private use. Women-only hours are set aside at the rock bath. Day-trip bathing runs from 9:00 to 16:00 and costs 700 yen for adults and 350 yen for elementary school children and younger. The inn generates its own electricity from a small hydroelectric plant and draws water from storage tanks, and it operates only from late April to early November, closing for the winter.