Tenkawa Mitake Jinja Onsen
- Location
- Tenkawa, Nara, Japan
- Water type
- bicarbonate
- Temperature
- 42 °C
- pH
- 8
Water profile
Relaxing — deep, immediate muscle release.
Loaded with major ions — the essential minerals (Ca, Mg).
Soft water — natural, classic buoyancy.
Tenkawa Mitake Jinja Onsen is set in the sacred Yoshino-Kumano mountains of Nara prefecture near the Tenkawa Daibenzaiten Shrine — dedicated to the goddess Benzaiten and considered one of Japan's three great Benzaiten shrines, a site of profound spiritual power drawn upon by traditional Japanese performing artists who make pilgrimage here to pray for artistic mastery. The bicarbonate-rich spring waters of Tenkawa emerge in a narrow valley deep in the Yoshino mountain range that UNESCO recognized as a World Heritage Cultural Landscape for its 1,300-year tradition of Shugendo mountain Buddhism. Bathing in the onsen while surrounded by cryptomeria forest in the Tenkawa valley — where the purity of water and air is considered supernaturally heightened by the concentrated sacred energy of the Omine mountain range — is a thermal experience unlike any other in Japan.