Loaded with major ions — the essential minerals (Ca, Mg).
Buoyancy
Standard buoyancy
LowHigh
Soft water — natural, classic buoyancy.
BicarbonatesSodiumCalcium
Nishimonai in Ugo, Akita is famous throughout Japan for its extraordinary Bon Odori festival — the Nishimonai Bon Odori, an Important Intangible Cultural Folk Property — where performers in mystery robes and tengai hats dance anonymously through the night in one of Japan's most visually haunting and spiritually charged festival traditions. The local bicarbonate and sulfated onsen water from the Dewa highland geothermal zone provides therapeutic bathing in a deeply rural Akita corner where traditional farming culture and ancient festival heritage are preserved with exceptional fidelity. A thermal stay here connects visitors to the spiritual depth of northern Japan's most distinctive performing arts tradition, where ancestral dance and volcanic mineral water both rise from the same ancient earth.
Insider tip — Nishimonai is a quiet rural town in the Ugo highlands of southern Akita, celebrated throughout Japan for its Bon Odori festival — one of the nation's three great bon dances — performed by dancers in mysterious veiled hats and indigo-dyed costumes. The bicarbonate and sulfate spring water at 43°C is exceptionally alkaline, giving it a silky, skin-softening quality prized by local farm workers for centuries. The surrounding Ugo countryside offers snow-covered rice paddies in winter and vivid green terraced fields in summer. The rural inn culture here feels genuinely unchanged from decades past.
