# Sakamoto Onsen

Iōjima sits in the East China Sea, a volcanic island in Kagoshima Prefecture that most people will never think to reach. Getting to Sakamoto Onsen from the island's port takes about fifteen minutes by car, and what you find at the end of that drive is not a building, not a lobby, not a attendant handing you a towel. What you find is a concrete tub set into the stone embankment of a shoreline, open to the sky, with a hot spring welling up from below.

The peculiarity of the place — and it is a genuine peculiarity — is that the water's temperature is not controlled by any human mechanism. When the tide is low, the source runs too hot to enter. You wait. The sea rises, saltwater spills over the embankment and mingles with the thermal spring, and gradually the temperature becomes something the body can accept. The ocean itself is the thermostat. There is a patience required here that most bathing does not ask of you.

To stay on an island like this for several nights is to reorganize your sense of time around things you cannot hurry. The tide will do what it does. The spring will flow as it flows. Each evening you might walk to the embankment and test the water with a hand, waiting for the moment the sea has done its work. That rhythm — elemental, indifferent to your schedule — becomes, after a while, oddly companionable.