Sakai Onsen Osaka

Sakai, in southern Osaka Prefecture on Osaka Bay, is one of Japan's most historically significant cities, the ancient port whose Medieval free-city status and autonomous merchant government — unprecedented in feudal Japan — made it the wealthiest and most commercially sophisticated urban centre in the country before Toyotomi Hideyoshi absorbed it into his domain, and the home of the largest kofun burial mounds in the world including the Daisen Kofun of Emperor Nintoku. Sakai Onsen Osaka draws on sodium and bicarbonate thermal waters from deep geological wells beneath the Osaka plain, providing restorative baths in a city of extraordinary archaeological and historical depth whose ancient burial mound landscape, Tanegashima gun manufacturing heritage where Japan's first arquebuses were copied, and traditional incense and knife craft industries create a layered cultural spa destination. The Daisen Kofun — the world's largest burial mound by area, so large it can only be fully appreciated from aerial photography — the Sakai City Museum's ancient history collections, and the traditional Sakai knife forging workshops producing knives used by the finest Japanese chefs create an outstandingly distinctive thermal destination in southern Osaka.