Ureshino Onsen Kisenkan

Kisenkan is a small eight-room inn in the hot spring town of Ureshino, Saga Prefecture, founded in 1936. Ureshino Onsen is an ancient spa recorded in the Hizen no Kuni Fudoki of 713, and it is counted alongside Hinokami Onsen in Shimane and Kizuregawa Onsen in Tochigi as one of Japan's three great waters for beautiful skin. Kisenkan is one of the very few inns here that owns its own source, the Shirakawa spring, one of the eight sources in Ureshino.

The water is a sodium bicarbonate-chloride spring, hypotonic, weakly alkaline and hot, emerging at 83.5 degrees Celsius with a pH of 8.2 and a yield of 85.6 liters per minute. Colorless and clear yet rich in bicarbonate, it has the silky, clinging texture that makes Ureshino famous. Rather than diluting the scalding source, the inn lets it cool naturally overnight, and it adds no heating, no recirculation and no disinfectant. That discipline earned it the top Pure Onsen A certification from the Pure Onsen Association, and it is the only property in Ureshino selected for the Kyushu 88 Hot Springs circuit. The spring is also licensed for drinking, at roughly one cup per day.

Bathing is in a single rock-walled bathhouse for each sex, each holding two tubs. There is no open-air bath, sauna or private bath. Overnight guests bathe from 15:00 to 23:00 and 6:30 to 9:30. Day-trip bathing runs 10:30 to 21:00 at 700 yen for adults and 300 yen for children, though the air-lift pump limits the volume of water, so day visitors are sometimes turned away when the inn is busy. Free parking for about 20 cars.