Togariishi Onsen Jomon no Yu

Togariishi Onsen Jomon no Yu — 'Togariishi Jōmon Era Hot Spring' — is a hot spring facility in Chino city, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, named for the adjacent Togariishi archaeological site — one of Japan's most significant Jōmon period (14,000-300 BCE) settlements, whose distinctive pointed stone (togarishi) artifacts and pit house village remains testify to the sophisticated culture that inhabited the Yatsugatake highland plateau of the Suwa region for thousands of years before the agricultural Yayoi culture arrived from the continent. The Jōmon no Yu name celebrates the ten-thousand-year cultural depth of the Chino area, where the Yatsugatake volcanic chain produces both the archaeological deposits that have preserved Jōmon material culture and the geothermal spring resources that may have attracted Japan's earliest inhabitants to this highland location above the Suwa Lake basin. The onsen connects contemporary bathers to the deepest layer of Japanese human history, offering mineral spring bathing in a volcanic highland landscape that has been continuously inhabited since the Ice Age and where the hot spring culture of contemporary Japan overlaps with the prehistoric bathing traditions of the Jōmon people whose sophisticated culture predates the conventional narrative of Japanese civilization.