Waseda Tennen Onsen Megumi no Yu

Insider tip — Megumi no Yu, the blessed spring, serves Misato City on the Edo River canal network in Saitama Prefecture — a city whose post-war growth from agricultural hamlet to suburban community mirrors the explosive development that reshaped the entire Kanto plain east of Tokyo. The Misato area waterways preserve the historical flood-control canal system engineered by Tokugawa hydrologists in the 17th century to divert the Tone River and protect Edo from seasonal flooding — an infrastructure achievement that transformed the wetland east of the capital into the productive agricultural plain that became the eastern metropolitan suburbs.