Echigo Nagano Onsen

Echigo Nagano Onsen rises in the snow country of Niigata Prefecture—the ancient Echigo Province whose vast winter snowfalls and mountain landscapes provided the setting for Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata's novel Snow Country (Yukiguni), the most celebrated literary evocation of the Japanese onsen tradition in world literature and a story set precisely in the kind of remote mountain hot spring inn that defines Niigata's thermal character. The sulfurous waters carry the volcanic intensity typical of Niigata's thermally active mountain areas, where geological forces that produce heavy snowfall and dramatic topography also bring mineral-rich thermal waters to the surface with particular energy. Bathing in sulfurous spring water within Echigo's famous snow country landscape brings together two of the most essential elements of Japanese winter culture: the white silence of heavy snowfall and the volcanic warmth of the sulfurous mineral bath.