Ryuugon Echigo Yuzawa Onsen

Echigo Yuzawa Onsen in the Yuzawa area of Niigata Prefecture is one of Japan's most celebrated snow country (yukiguni) onsen destinations, immortalised in Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata's novel 'Snow Country' (1956) — a work that opens with the famous line 'The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country' as the protagonist arrives at Yuzawa to meet his geisha companion. The mildly sulphurous spring waters of the historic Yuzawa spa district, enriched by contact with the sedimentary geology of the Snow Country mountains, have warmed visitors making the journey over the Echigo Mountains from Tokyo for centuries. Today Yuzawa is as celebrated for its exceptional powder skiing at the GALA Yuzawa and Naeba ski resorts as for its hot spring bathing, and the combination of world-class skiing and traditional onsen culture represents a quintessentially Japanese mountain resort experience. Kawabata's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, his novels set in these mountains, and the continuing pilgrimage of Japanese literary enthusiasts to the specific ryokan and station of his fictional universe give Yuzawa Onsen a literary resonance unmatched by almost any other hot spring destination in Japan.