Tsukuba Spa Garden Ibaraki

Tsukuba Spa Garden Ibaraki is located in Tsukuba City, Ibaraki Prefecture, a planned science city established in the 1960s and 1970s to relocate research institutions from Tokyo — now home to over 300 research institutes and universities including the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science, the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Tsukuba Space Center, making it one of the highest concentrations of scientific research in Asia. The bicarbonate thermal waters draw from the deep sedimentary geology beneath the Tsukuba Science City, providing therapeutic bathing in a uniquely intellectual community context where Nobel laureates, particle physicists, and space researchers share the same mineral bath as the region's farmers in a democratic expression of Japan's hot spring culture. Mount Tsukuba — the sacred 'Mountain of Purple' rising 877 metres above the Kanto Plain as one of the 'Hundred Famous Mountains of Japan' — provides a spiritual counterpoint to the city's scientific rationalism, and the spa serves as a contemplative retreat between Tsukuba's intellectual demands.