Itsuki Onsen

Itsuki Onsen is found in Itsuki, a tiny mountain hamlet in the Kuma district of Kumamoto Prefecture that holds a singular place in Japanese musical culture as the birthplace of the 'Itsuki no Komoriuta' — the 'Lullaby of Itsuki,' one of Japan's most beloved and melancholic traditional songs, a lullaby attributed to the impoverished servant girls who worked as nursemaids in the households of the Hitoyoshi basin's wealthier families and who sang of their longing for their own faraway mountain villages in a melody of such heartbreaking beauty that it has been performed, recorded, and cherished across Japan for centuries as an expression of the universal human longing for home. The village's remote mountain setting in the deep Kuma River watershed, its small traditional community, and the knowledge that this song emerged from the lives of ordinary working girls in a landscape not so different from today's provide an extraordinarily poignant context for visiting Itsuki's onsen. The mineral springs here provide silica-rich thermal bathing in a hamlet where the echo of Japan's most moving traditional lullaby seems to linger in the mountain air.