Kinosaki Onsen

The organising idea here is that the town is one inn. The ryokan are the guest rooms, the streets are the corridors, and the seven public bathhouses scattered along them are the baths. Guests are given a pass to all seven, though one or another is usually shut for works, change into the yukata and wooden geta their inn provides, and spend the evening walking between them. The sound of geta on the stone streets is what the town is known for as much as the water.

The springs have been used for 1,300 years. Each of the seven bathhouses is different: one is built into a cave, one has an outdoor bath under the trees, one is styled after a Buddhist temple. Most people manage three or four in a night. Do not try all seven.

The town burned and shook down in the 1925 earthquake and was rebuilt with a deliberate policy: keep the streets narrow, keep the willows along the Otani river, keep the bathhouses public rather than letting the hotels build their own. That decision is why Kinosaki still looks like this and why the streets are full in the evening instead of empty.

Shiga Naoya came here in 1913 to recover after being hit by a train and wrote At Kinosaki, one of the best-known short stories in modern Japanese literature, about watching small animals die. There is a monument.

Crab season runs from early November to March and is the reason to book months ahead; Matsuba crab from the Sea of Japan is what the inns build their winter menus around. Two and a half hours from Kyoto on the limited express.