Beppu

People have used the springs at Beppu for a very long time: the eighth-century Bungo Fudoki describes the boiling pools of the area, and the fiercest of them were called hells and left alone as dangerous ground rather than bathed in. Through the medieval and Edo periods a few small spa settlements grew around the gentler springs, with Hamawaki and Kannawa the best known, and the Buddhist monk Ippen is credited in local tradition with opening baths at Kannawa in the 13th century.

The modern city was made by transport and drilling. Beppu Station opened in 1911, a passenger sailing from Osaka followed in 1912 on a route that is still the longest-running of its kind in Japan, and new boring techniques opened thousands of wells, so that Beppu's output of hot water became the largest in the country. Aburaya Kumahachi, who founded the Kameno-i inn here in 1911, promoted the resort energetically: in 1928 he started regular sightseeing buses round the hells with Japan's first women bus guides, and he is generally credited with turning a group of spa hamlets into a tourist town. Beppu was incorporated as a city in 1924.

Growth continued through the 20th century, with company outings, honeymooners and health cures filling the inns, and it peaked in the boom years before tastes shifted towards quieter, smaller resorts such as neighbouring Yufuin. The opening of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in 2000 brought several thousand international students to the hills above the town, and the city has since worked to present its bathing culture, rather than its nightlife, as the reason to come.

Beppu's culture is bathing culture. The eight hot-spring areas known together as the Beppu Hatto each have their own water and their own character, and the city keeps a large number of small communal bathhouses, some run by neighbourhood associations for residents, which charge a coin or two and work on trust. Stamp books encourage bathers to collect visits across the eight areas. The forms of bathing are unusually varied: hot sand, steam boxes, mud, and the grey-white sulphur water of Myoban.

The hells are treated differently, as a sight rather than a bath, and several of them are nationally designated Places of Scenic Beauty. Around them a whole minor industry has grown up of steamed puddings, hot-spring eggs and bath salts. At Myoban the collection of yunohana crystals in thatched huts continues by a method that has been recognised as an important intangible folk cultural property.

Festivals turn on the springs and the hills: the April hot-spring festival opens bathhouses free of charge, and the burning of the grass on Mount Ogi lights the skyline in early spring. The university has given Beppu a sizeable foreign population for a Japanese city of its size, so shops and restaurants signpost in several languages and the student districts feel international. Oita people have a reputation for being easy-going and hospitable, and conversation in a bathhouse with a stranger is normal here in a way it is not everywhere in Japan.

About 113,000 people live in Beppu, on a narrow shelf of land between the bay and the mountains, with the hot-spring districts climbing the slope behind. The population has been falling slowly and the city is ageing, a pattern common to regional Japan, though the university offsets it: several thousand students, many from other parts of Asia, live and work here and make up an unusually large share of the town.

Tourism and hot-spring hospitality are the main employers, together with hospitals, care homes and services for older residents who move here for the climate and the water. Steam is a utility as much as an attraction: it heats greenhouses and buildings, cooks food in public kitchens, and rises from drains and manholes in ordinary streets all winter.

Life is quiet outside the tourist districts. The shopping arcades near the station have empty units, as in many Japanese provincial cities, and much everyday trade has moved to roadside stores. Residents still use the small neighbourhood baths in the evening, the fish and vegetables come from the bay and the Oita countryside, and weekends are spent on the hill roads towards Yufuin or on the coast. Attracting younger residents and keeping the older bathhouses in repair are long-running concerns.

Beppu cooks with its steam. Jigoku-mushi, hell steaming, uses the vents directly: baskets of vegetables, eggs, prawns, shellfish and chicken are set over the hole and cooked in minutes, picking up a faint saltiness from the mineral water. Public steam kitchens in Kannawa let people do this themselves, and hot-spring eggs and steamed puddings are sold all along the same lanes.

The city's best-known restaurant dish is Beppu reimen, cold chewy noodles in a chilled broth with kimchi and sliced meat, adapted from Korean cold noodles after the war and now made in a Beppu style that is heartier than its original. From the wider prefecture come toriten, chicken tempura eaten with ponzu and mustard, and dango-jiru, a country soup of flat wheat dumplings with root vegetables and miso; its sweet cousin, yaseuma, serves the same dough with roasted soybean flour and sugar. Kabosu, a green citrus grown across Oita, is squeezed over almost everything.

The bay supplies horse mackerel and mackerel, often eaten raw, along with flying fish and shellfish, and the hills behind produce shiitake mushrooms, which Oita grows in quantity on oak logs. Shochu, distilled in Oita mainly from barley, is the usual drink, served with hot water in winter, and hot-spring water itself is sold to drink at some of the springs.