# Inunakiyama Onsen

There is a particular quality of quiet that belongs to places long used for purposes other than leisure. Inunakiyama Onsen, tucked into the mountains of Izumisano in southern Osaka Prefecture, carries that quality. The valley was established as a center of *shugendo* practice more than thirteen centuries ago, and the waters here have been associated ever since with healing — not the fashionable kind, but the older, less articulate kind that asks you simply to stay still for a while. Three inns line the upper reaches of the Kashii River, close enough together to feel like a single community, remote enough from the city that the sounds you notice are the river's.

What makes a stay of several nights interesting here is precisely the absence of spectacle. The source bath, Yamannoyu, sits along the river without ceremony. You go, you return, you go again. The legend attached to this place — a faithful dog said to have saved its master long ago — gives the valley its name and its particular atmosphere of old obligation, the sense that something was earned here rather than simply discovered. The inns, the only ones in Osaka Prefecture that carry the designation of a true *onsen-go*, hold that inheritance quietly.

And then there is the proximity to Kansai International Airport — a fact that sounds incongruous until you consider what it might mean. A traveler arriving in Japan, or preparing to leave, could spend a night or two in this valley rather than in an airport hotel. The mountains absorb jet lag rather well, it turns out. The waters do not announce themselves.