Sari Onsen

Sari Onsen is a bicarbonate and carbonated thermal spring in Saga Prefecture—the smallest of Japan's forty-seven prefectures and home to one of the world's great ceramic traditions in the Arita and Imari pottery districts, where European porcelain manufacturers paid enormous sums to import Arita ware during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Japan was the primary global source of true hard-paste porcelain outside China. The effervescent, skin-stimulating quality of naturally carbonated bicarbonate water brings a lively mineral character to bathing in a prefecture whose cultural identity has long been defined by the transformative power of fire—both the ceramic kiln's transformative heat and the geological thermal energy that drives the spring to the surface. Saga's ceramic heritage and thermal spring tradition together embody the prefecture's deep relationship with the transformative energies of earth and fire.