A reference for Japan's hot spring towns, written for people who do not read Japanese.
Japan has thousands of hot spring towns. Almost all of them are documented in Japanese and almost none in English: of the fifty towns with the most inns, only thirteen have an English Wikipedia article. Visitors who want a hot spring are choosing between the same handful of famous names, because the rest are invisible to them.
This site covers 1,538 of them. Every town has its location, its water type, and — where the source records them — the temperature, the pH, and the number of sources.
The descriptions on this site are assembled from the recorded figures — water type, temperature, pH, prefecture — rather than translated from someone else's prose. That is a deliberate limit. It keeps the pages factual, it keeps them consistent between towns, and it means this site is not republishing another writer's work in a new language.
It also means the pages are plainer than a travel article. Depth comes from the guides, which are written rather than generated.
It is not a booking service and it does not hold inventory, prices or availability. It is not affiliated with any hot spring town, inn, tourism board or booking platform.
Facts here can be wrong, and some of them will be. If you find a mistake — a water type, a reading, a photograph of the wrong place — please tell us. Corrections to the underlying facts are best made on the Japanese Wikipedia article itself, which is linked from every town page; they reach this site at the next refresh.