Takaoka Onsen

Takaoka Onsen serves Japan's 'City of Metal Casting,' where over 400 years of copperware production has created the country's most important center of Buddhist bells, temple artifacts, and decorative metalwork — a tradition so refined that Takaoka copperware is recognized as a National Traditional Craft and its artisans produce the majority of Japan's ritual metal objects, from the massive temple bells whose sound marks the New Year across the country to the delicate bronze incense burners used in tea ceremony. The city's treasures include the Great Buddha of Takaoka — a 16-meter bronze Amida Buddha completed in 1933 — and Zuiryu-ji temple, a masterwork of early Edo-period Zen architecture designated a National Treasure for the harmonious perfection of its garden, gate, and main hall composition. The onsen's siliceous mineral waters provide restorative bathing in a city whose metalworking heritage and Zen temple architecture represent two of the purest expressions of Japanese aesthetic culture existing side by side in a single compact historic cityscape.