Yuhama Onsen Miura Ryokan

Miura Ryokan is a single isolated inn standing in a beech forest at about 700 meters above sea level on the southwestern slope of Mt. Kurikoma, in Hanayama, Kurihara City, Miyagi Prefecture. The spring is said to have been discovered in the spring of 1824, at the end of the Edo period, by matagi bear hunters, and the Miura family has looked after it ever since. Until National Route 398 opened in 1982, reaching the inn meant a four-hour walk over a mountain pass from Nurukawa. The 2008 Iwate-Miyagi Nairiku earthquake damaged the buildings and disturbed the source, but the inn reopened in the summer of 2012.

The water is a simple sulfur spring (hypotonic, mildly alkaline, high temperature) with a pH of 8.8, a source temperature of 97.3 degrees Celsius at the indoor bath spring, and a flow of 48.6 liters per minute. The faintly sulfurous, soft water is supplied entirely free-flowing to every tub and constantly overflows. It is traditionally valued for skin conditions and atopic dermatitis, neuralgia, lower back pain, and general fatigue.

There are three bathing places: the cypress-lined indoor bath Iwana-no-Yu, separated by gender; a garden open-air bath; and a mixed-gender open-air bath beside the mountain stream, passed on the footpath up to the inn. The inn has no electricity and is known as a ranpu no yado, an inn lit only by oil lamps at night, with no television, radio, or mobile phone signal. Day bathing costs 500 yen from 8:00 to 19:00, use of the common rest hall is 1,000 yen per person, and a private room is 3,000 yen per person. The inn operates seasonally, from late April to early November.