Otofuke Onsen Hokkaido

Otofuke Onsen Hokkaido is a thermal bathing facility in Otofuke Town in the Tokachi Subprefecture of Hokkaido, one of Japan's largest agricultural municipalities by area and the productive hub of the Tokachi region's dairy farming, potato cultivation, and sugar beet production on the broad alluvial plain at the confluence of the Tokachi and Otofuke rivers. The Obihiro-Tokachi area surrounding Otofuke is celebrated for the Banei Tokachi draft horse racing at Obihiro Racecourse, the world's only remaining weight-pull draft horse racing facility where massive Percheron and Breton draft horses drag heavy steel sleds over two artificially constructed earthen obstacles in a race format unique to Hokkaido that reflects the historical importance of draft horses in the development of Tokachi's agricultural frontier. The sodium-bicarbonate spring waters here provide therapeutic bathing in a prosperous agricultural community whose horse racing heritage, Tokachi dairy cuisine, and the wide-horizon agricultural landscape of the Tokachi Plain create a distinctively Hokkaido character quite different from the mountain hot spring culture of Honshu — an onsen experience embedded in the open agricultural grandeur of Japan's northern agricultural frontier.