Yuzawa Onsen Inaho

Yuzawa Onsen Inaho is a thermal bathing facility in Yuzawa City, southern Akita Prefecture, a community that has earned recognition throughout Japan as one of the country's premier sake-producing cities, where the exceptional quality of Akita's soft snowmelt water and premium Akita Komachi rice creates conditions for brewing some of Japan's finest junmai and ginjo-style sake in breweries that open their historic kura storehouses to visitors during the Kurabito no Yado cultural exchange and annual sake festivals celebrating the region's brewing heritage. Yuzawa City is also associated with the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kawabata Yasunari, whose masterwork Snow Country opens with the famous line about emerging from a long tunnel at the border of the snow country — the Joetsu Shinkansen tunnel that historically connected Yuzawa to the Pacific side of Japan — as the narrator arrives at a hot spring village modeled partly on the Yuzawa area's traditional onsen culture. The bicarbonate thermal waters of Inaho offer relaxation in a city where the pleasures of Japan's finest rice wine and the therapeutic comfort of hot spring bathing combine in a cultural celebration of northern Japan's remarkable gifts.