Tono Onsen Furusato

Tono Onsen Furusato is situated in Tono City, Iwate Prefecture, universally celebrated in Japan as the spiritual homeland of folk legend and supernatural folklore, whose mystique was permanently fixed in national consciousness by Yanagita Kunio's 1910 masterwork Tono Monogatari, a collection of supernatural tales featuring water sprites (kappa), house spirits (zashiki warashi), shapeshifting foxes, river gods, and ancestral ghosts gathered from local villagers in language of extraordinary evocative power. The Tono basin retains the magariya L-shaped thatched farmhouses that appear in the illustrations of the original Monogatari, and kappa statues line the banks of the Sarugaishi River where the green water sprites are still said to lurk beneath the surface waiting for unwary travelers and children. The simple mineral spring waters here restore body and imagination equally in a city where Japan's most beloved body of folk supernatural legend was first written down and where the uncanny remains closer to the surface of everyday life than anywhere else in the country.