Yuwaku Onsen, the hot-spring valley above Kanazawa that Hanasaku Iroha borrowed

In 2011 the anime Hanasaku Iroha (花咲くいろは) set its fictional inn in a hot-spring town modelled on Yuwaku Onsen (湯涌温泉), a narrow valley about fifty minutes by bus above Kanazawa. That autumn the town staged the lantern festival the series had invented, and the festival has returned most Octobers since.

A festival that began on screen

The Bonbori Matsuri (ぼんぼり祭り, the lantern festival) climbs from the main street to Yuwaku Inari Shrine. Visitors write wishes on tags called nozomi-fuda (のぞみ札), and the tags are burned at the shrine as the evening ends. It began as a tie-in and now feels like the town's own autumn rite, with food stalls, a procession, and a crowd that thins quickly once the last buses leave.

The valley on an ordinary day

Outside festival week, Yuwaku is a single street of inns, a river, and a public bathhouse, Sōyu Shirasagi-no-yu (総湯 白鷺の湯), which lets day visitors in for a few hundred yen. Nearby, the Yumeji-kan museum holds work by the painter Takehisa Yumeji, who stayed in the valley in 1917.

Further up the slope, the Edo-mura open-air museum keeps Edo-period houses that were moved here from elsewhere. A small himuro (氷室, ice house) is packed with snow each winter and opened at the start of summer, a custom much older than any anime.

Seeing the frame without leaning on it

The curve of the main street, the bridge and the shrine steps are easy to recognise. The inns are working businesses, so take photos from the road rather than from their entrances, and book a room if you want to see inside one.

ぼんぼりの灯りは、物語が終わったあとも湯涌の坂道に残っている。