Kashima Onsen Saga
- Location
- Kashima, Saga Prefecture, Kyushu, Japan
- Water type
- sodium chloride
- Temperature
- 40 °C
- pH
- 7.3
Water profile
Relaxing — deep, immediate muscle release.
Loaded with major ions — the essential minerals (Ca, Mg).
Dense, salty water — you float without effort.
Kashima Onsen Saga is a thermal bathing facility in Kashima City on the shores of the Ariake Sea in Saga Prefecture, a coastal city distinguished by its extraordinary tidal flat environment on Japan's largest and most productive intertidal ecosystem, where the Ariake Sea's massive 6-meter tidal range creates the most extensive mudflat habitat in the Japanese archipelago, supporting an extraordinary abundance of specialized marine life including the beloved mudskipper (mutsu-gorō) fish that are celebrated in Kashima's distinctive ecological culture and featured in local cuisine and the unusual mudskipper fishing tradition unique to the Ariake coast. The Yutoku Inari Shrine, a 17th-century vermilion-lacquered shrine complex built on a hillside above Kashima and ranked among Japan's three great Inari (fox deity) shrines alongside Fushimi Inari in Kyoto and Toyokawa Inari in Aichi, draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims annually to its cascading vermilion torii gates and incense-scented cedar forest in one of Kyushu's most important Shinto pilgrimage destinations. The chloride thermal spring waters here offer bathing in a coastal city where the extraordinary tidal flat ecosystem and the magnificence of one of Japan's greatest Inari shrines create an unusually rich and distinctive spa town identity on the Ariake coast.