Michi-no-Eki Tsubaki Hananoyu: The Roadside Station Built Around a Bath

Overview

Most roadside stations in Japan are a car park, a farm shop and a lavatory. This one is built around a bath. Michi-no-Eki Tsubaki Hananoyu stands on Route 42 at Tsubaki, on the coast south of Shirahama's resort beaches, and opened in April 2010. Its water comes from one source, Horaiyu: a simple sulphur spring, classified alkaline, hypotonic and low-temperature, at pH 9.9. The sulphur is faint, 2.4 mg per kilogram, so the smell people brace for is barely there. What you notice instead is the alkalinity, which lifts away dead skin like soap; regulars say you can skip the toner afterwards.

The source emerges at only 31°C, so the indoor pool is warmed. An open-air bath opened in April 2025 uses the water as it comes, beside it sits a sauna of Kishu hinoki seating two or three, both built in what had been the garden, one set each side. The bath opens 11:00 to 20:00 and closes on Tuesdays, or the next weekday when that is a holiday. Admission was revised on 1 June 2026: ¥700 from junior-high age up, ¥300 for primary-school children, free below that; the private family bath is ¥3,000 for fifty minutes.

Outside, the footbath is free, 10:00 to 17:00, and a vending machine fills 50 litres of spring water for ¥100. The canteen, Manma, serves at lunchtime only; its combi bowl sets Pacific bluefin and boiled whitebait from Isoma in Tanabe over rice with toasted sesame and shiso. Tsubaki was known long before the roadside station: the springs appear in the Kishu domain's gazetteer of 1839, and an 1851 ranking of Japanese spas calls them the bath of the Ohechi, the coastal branch of the Kumano Kodo. Temple tradition credits their discovery to a priest, Tankai, who followed a white egret to the water. The car park is small — fourteen cars, two coaches — and free.