Dai Onsen Hotel Sanemon

Hotel Sanemon is a twenty-room hot-spring inn in Dai Onsen, a spa hamlet set in the valley of the Dai River in Hanamaki City, Iwate Prefecture. Legend credits the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro with finding these waters some 1,200 years ago, while historians date the spa's opening to around the fourteenth century, and lords of the Nanbu domain came here regularly to take the cure. Hanamaki Onsen, just to the east, is a separate resort created in the Taisho era by piping water down from Dai; in contrast to those large hotels, Dai Onsen still keeps the plain, nostalgic feel of a working cure town, its timber inns lining a twisting slope. Hotel Sanemon, which calls itself the inn of Iyashiro no Yu and of the four seasons, occupies one corner of that lane.

The water is a simple sulfur spring rising at 86.5 degrees Celsius with a pH of 8.5, a mildly alkaline high-temperature source that feels soft on the skin and carries the characteristic sulfur scent. The inn states plainly that it never recirculates its water, delivering one hundred percent free-flowing spring water. Bath temperatures sit at roughly 41.5 degrees indoors and 40.3 degrees in the open-air tub. The waters are said to help with neuralgia, muscle and joint pain, bruises and sprains, chronic digestive complaints, poor circulation, convalescence, fatigue, chronic skin conditions, cuts and diabetes, and the spring has a local reputation for beautifying the skin.

Bathing is in one large indoor bath and one open-air bath for each sex. The men's indoor bath is glazed to the ceiling for an airy, near-open-air feeling, while the women's bath is finished in warm wood. The indoor bath includes a shallow reclining pool, and the open-air rock tub, large enough for two or three bathers, looks out on the seasons with the river audible below. Day visitors may bathe from 15:00 to 19:30 (last admission) for 700 yen for adults, 400 yen for elementary-school children and under, and free for children under three, with a suggested limit of about two hours per person. Closures are set month by month, so it is worth calling ahead. The inn has thirteen Japanese-style and seven Japanese-Western rooms, sleeping up to seventy guests, with about twenty-five free parking spaces.