Hijiori Onsen Wakamatsuya Murai Rokusuke

Wakamatsuya Murai Rokusuke is a traditional cure inn in Hijiori Onsen, a hot spring hamlet set in the valley of the Dozan River in Okura Village, northern Yamagata Prefecture. Hijiori is said to have been opened some 1,200 years ago, and its name, meaning broken elbow, comes from a legend about an elderly monk who fell from a cliff and healed his shattered arm in the water. The inn has operated here since the late Edo period, and a photograph of the main building as it looked around 1923 still hangs inside. It stands at the centre of the village, facing the street where Hijiori's celebrated early morning market is held from spring through autumn.

The water is a sodium chloride and bicarbonate spring. The inn draws on two supplies: Murai Gensen, its own source, which welled up inside the building roughly sixty years ago, and the communal sources managed by the Hijiori spring cooperative. Murai Gensen emerges at 43.0 degrees Celsius with a near-neutral pH of 6.2 and a total dissolved mineral content of about 1,853 mg per kilogram. It carries iron and carbon dioxide, shows a faint ochre tint, tastes lightly salty with a distinct fizz, and leaves fine bubbles clinging to the skin. The men's and women's baths use a blend of communal and Murai water, while the private bath runs mostly on Murai Gensen, so the two baths feel noticeably different under the same roof.

There is one large bath each for men and women, plus a private bath named Sachi no Yu, christened by Prince Takamatsu during a stay at the inn. A free-flowing foot bath sits beside the entrance from early April through November. The inn is small, with fourteen guest rooms in total, eight of them with private toilets, and a capacity of thirty guests, and it keeps two self-catering kitchens and a coin laundry for guests settling in for a long cure. Day bathing is currently suspended according to the inn's own website.