# Mifuku Onsen

There is a particular kind of place that exists not to be visited but simply to be used — unremarkably, daily, by people with somewhere else to be afterward. Mifuku Onsen, on the campus of what was once Sōzō Gakuen University in Takasaki, Gunma, was that kind of place. Opened in 1994, it drew its water from a metasilicic acid spring, colorless and clear, and made it available free of charge to students and staff, with the doors open to anyone else who cared to come. A café and restaurant sat nearby. The bus from Takasaki Station, a local circulator called the Gurulin, left passengers a minute's walk away.

What one imagines, thinking about it now, is less a bathhouse than a commons — a place where the rhythms of campus life and the rhythms of the water quietly ran together. Students between classes, office workers on a long lunch, neighbors who had no particular affiliation with the university: all of them passing through the same clear water, the same unhurried air. The source water could even be drawn and taken home. It was that kind of generosity, practical and unstated.

It closed in 2012, following a scandal involving the institution that ran it. What remains is only the outline of an idea — that a university might offer its waters to a city, that a bath might belong to a neighborhood rather than to a destination. Takasaki is a city of transit, a junction point. Mifuku was, briefly, a reason to pause.