The New York times has a travel article that focuses on Tsurunoyu Onsen in Akita prefecture:
It was after a three-hour train ride north from Tokyo, heading for Tsurunoyu Onsen, that I learned Tsurunoyu isn’t an onsen at all. “It’s really more of a hitou,” Moto, my guide, delicately pointed out. We were in Honshu Island’s far-north prefecture of Akita, winding our way up the unpaved road to the 300-year-old mountain lodge, and Moto seemed especially intent on setting me straight. An onsen, he explained, is a natural hot spring. A hitou is a natural hot spring that is hidden. Ah. Hiddenness being perhaps the most prized characteristic in Japanese culture — second only to a love of drawing precise distinctions on a minute scale — I undertood this was a critical difference.Tsurunoyu finally emerged from a gulch in the hills. It seemed tiny. The original lodge is flanked by a handful of low thatch-and-wood structures added over the decades, all backed by a sheer, massive wall of coniferous green. In the middle of the compound is a stream that runs down the hillside and alongside a shallow, oblong pool of hot, ice-blue water that bubbles up from the ground, where people soak for hours at a stretch. Until World War II, Tsurunoyu was something like a sanitarium; the ill and injured came here to recoup with the help of the water’s healing minerals. It’s the oldest and most picturesque of seven hot-spring inns in the immediate area, known collectively as the Nyuto onsens. In a 20-mile radius, there are some dozen more — but those are not really hitous and, according to Japanese logic, draw fewer visitors.
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