Tonami Onsen

Tonami Onsen serves the self-proclaimed 'City of Tulips,' a flat agricultural city in the Toyama plain whose annual Tonami Tulip Fair transforms the city each spring into Japan's most spectacular flower festival, displaying over 700 varieties and 3 million tulip bulbs in the vast Tonami Tulip Park in a chromatic spectacle that has made Tonami famous across Asia as a destination for spring flower tourism. The city produces the majority of Japan's tulip bulbs — a heritage dating to the introduction of Dutch tulip cultivation techniques in the early 20th century — and the surrounding countryside's flat fertile plain, crossed by the Sho River on its way to Toyama Bay, has proven ideally suited to the large-scale cultivation of bulb flowers that has become Tonami's defining agricultural identity. The onsen's siliceous geothermal waters provide restorative bathing in Japan's tulip capital, where the contrast between the brilliant color of spring flower fields and the surrounding backdrop of snow-capped Northern Alps creates one of Japan's most unexpected and visually dramatic seasonal landscapes.