Nita Onsen
- Location
- Nita, Shimane Prefecture, Japan
- Water type
- bicarbonate
- Temperature
- 40 °C
- pH
- 8
Water profile
Relaxing — deep, immediate muscle release.
Loaded with major ions — the essential minerals (Ca, Mg).
Soft water — natural, classic buoyancy.
Nita Onsen is located in Nita Town, Shimane Prefecture, in the Nita basin of the Chugoku Mountains where the Hino River system drains toward the Sea of Japan through a landscape of cedar and hinoki cypress forests, traditional iron-smelting (tatara) sites, and the quietly scenic Shimane interior highlands. The siliceous thermal waters here serve a rural mountain community where the ancient craft of tatara (traditional iron sand smelting) was once practiced — the same craft that produced the tamahagane steel used in Japanese sword making, immortalized in Studio Ghibli's film Princess Mononoke, which was partly inspired by the tatara landscape of the Chugoku Mountains. Bathing at Nita Onsen offers a connection to this extraordinary cultural and industrial heritage of traditional Japanese metallurgy in a forest landscape whose rivers still flow with iron-bearing sand.