Kannawa, Myoban and Shibaseki Onsen — Spring Water Analysis, Temperature and Snowfall

Three of the eight spa districts of Beppu, and no two alike.

Kannawa takes its name from a hell in Buddhist story. It appears as a place of hot springs and "hells" in the 8th-century provincial gazetteer, and the monk Ippen is said to have opened its steam bath in the Kamakura period. The naturalist Kaibara Ekiken wrote about it at length in the Edo period. The steam bath is a stone chamber with sixteen stone pillows laid out inside — sixteen bathers at a time. There was a period when crutches, left by people whose legs had mended, piled up before the Yakushi statue at its entrance.

In 1876 Kannawa was still 34 houses taking in guests, half of them farming as well. By 1913 there were thirteen inns and 70,000 bathers a year. In 1928 a six-storey bathhouse 21 metres high opened and drew crowds — and was pulled down in May 1945 because it might serve as a target for bombers.

Myoban is a district of straw-thatched huts for harvesting bath crystals. The method is peculiar to it: steam from the ground is led through blue clay dug locally, and the crystals that form are scraped off with a trowel. Elsewhere such products are made by settling out the minerals from the water. The technique was designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property in 2006. A fire in 1958 destroyed inns here and the district was left behind by the boom years — and the plan notes that this is exactly why so much of its natural setting survives.

Shibaseki lies in a narrow gorge, flooded so often that it was barely known until modern times. It was designated in 1985 along with the other two.

Of all the steam rising over Beppu, about 30% of it rises at Kannawa and 20% at Myoban.

Sources: 環境省 鉄輪・明礬・柴石温泉 国民保養温泉地計画書

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4 hot spring sources with published analyses lie within 3 km of the centre of this onsen town, nearest first.

These are analyses of hot spring sources, not a list of baths you can visit. They date from 1910 to 2005, many from decades ago, so today’s temperature and chemistry may differ. Names are as recorded in Japanese. Temperature and pH bands follow Japan’s standard for analysing hot springs.

Source: processed from the hot spring analysis data in the Geothermal Information Database (GRES-DB), Geological Survey of Japan, AIST

Places within 20 km of this onsen town, chosen from those most read about on Wikipedia, favouring places with an English Wikipedia article, and listed nearest first.

Based on the Japanese Wikipedia lists of sights in each prefecture, as compiled in travel-log-data (CC BY-SA 4.0). English names from Wikidata (CC0). The content of this section is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Up to five within 40 km, straight-line, nearest first. Quality rank is out of the 397 Japanese ski areas.

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