# Ofuka Onsen

In the mountains of Akita, along a side road off the Hachimantai Aspite Line, there is a small bathing place that does not announce itself. Ofuka Onsen sits within Towada-Hachimantai National Park, and the sulphurous waters here have been drawing people since 1956 — not tourists, exactly, but people who come to soak, to rest, to let the water do its work over several days. In 1959 the site was designated a *kokumin hoyō onsen*, a national therapeutic hot spring, which says something about the seriousness with which these waters are regarded.

The facility is modest by any measure. The onsen small, the season bounded — from early May to mid-October — and guests sleep in *ondoru* cottages, rooms warmed from below in the old Korean-derived tradition. To stay here for several nights would mean surrendering to a particular slowness. The sulphur water asks nothing of you except that you return to it again and again. There are no diversions to arrange. The rhythm becomes the point.

What remains, after a few days at Ofuka, is probably not a clear memory of any single moment but something closer to a residue — the faint mineral smell that clings to skin, the particular quality of mountain quiet, the sense that the place has been doing exactly this, unhurriedly, for the better part of seventy years.