Asahi Onsen

Asahi Onsen in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, is an urban hot spring facility in Japan's most cosmopolitan port city — the city that pioneered Japan's international trade in the Meiji era, home to the oldest Western-style buildings in Japan and a large resident foreign community — where simple mineral spring waters drawn from the geology beneath the Rokkō mountain range provide thermal bathing in a city better known for its Western cultural heritage, world-famous Kobe beef, and the Nada sake breweries than for its onsen culture. The Rokkō Mountains behind Kobe rise to nearly 1,000 meters above the narrow coastal plain where the city is built, and the granitic and metamorphic basement of these mountains produces mineral spring waters that serve a number of Kobe's neighborhood onsen and sento establishments in a city whose dense urban fabric retains a network of public bathing facilities serving the traditional Japanese daily bathing need. Asahi Onsen — 'Morning Sun Hot Spring' — draws bathers seeking the simple mineral waters and communal bathing atmosphere of a traditional Japanese neighborhood onsen in the multicultural setting of Kobe's Meiji-era legacy.