Yuwaku Onsen, where Hanasaku Iroha invented a lantern festival the village kept

The bus from Kanazawa Station spends the better part of an hour leaving the city, follows a narrowing valley, and stops where the road gives up. The terminus is Yuwaku Onsen (湯涌温泉): one sloping street, a handful of inns, a public bath, cedar on three sides. From midsummer into autumn the street is lined with paper lanterns on wooden posts, and they are there because an animated series needed a festival for its closing episodes.

A festival written before it was held

Hanasaku Iroha (花咲くいろは) follows Ohana, a Tokyo teenager sent to work at her grandmother's hot-spring inn, Kissuisō (喜翆荘), in a town called Yunosagi (湯乃鷺). The town is Yuwaku under another name. Yuwaku's origin story has a farmer finding the spring by watching a white heron rest in it, the public bath is still called Shirasagi-no-yu (白鷺の湯, the white heron bath), and sagi is the heron in the fictional name too.

For its ending the series invented the Bonbori Festival. In the story, the small fox deity of the local shrine must travel to Izumo in the tenth month, when the gods are said to gather there, and the townspeople light bonbori (ぼんぼり), paper lanterns on posts, to show her the road. None of this was an existing Yuwaku custom. In the autumn the series aired, the village and the studio staged it anyway as the Yuwaku Bonbori Matsuri (湯涌ぼんぼり祭り), and it has returned in most years since.

The shrine at the top of the steps

Yuwaku Inari Shrine (湯涌稲荷神社) is reached by a flight of stone steps that leaves the main street between buildings, easy to walk past if you are looking at the inns. The hall at the top is small and wooden, with the stone foxes that mark an Inari shrine, and the cedars close over it.

The wish tags are called nozomi-fuda (のぞみ札). During lantern season they are sold in the village, written on with a felt pen, and hung from the bonbori along the path; the tourism association can say where they are on sale that week. Most ask for what any shrine is asked for, exams and health and a safe birth, and a fair number carry a careful drawing of a character in one corner.

のぞみ札に願いを書いて、ぼんぼりに結ぶ。

The instruction is no longer than that: write the wish on the tag, tie it to a lantern. This is the village's working shrine and not a set, so keep voices down and photograph the steps from one side, leaving them clear for people to climb.

What was drawn and what stands

Kissuisō cannot be visited, because it was never one building. The inn most often named as an influence, the grand Hakuunrō (白雲楼) hotel, stood on the hillside above the village and has been demolished. Looking for its entrance among the real ryokan leads only to other people's front doors, and the inns here are small enough that a stranger with a camera in the entrance hall is noticed.

A short uphill walk past the last inn brings you to Gyokusenko (玉泉湖), a still green pond with a footpath around it, which the series drew closely. Beside it sits a small himuro (氷室), an ice house. Yuwaku packs it with snow in midwinter and opens it at the start of summer, reviving the Kaga domain's custom of keeping winter snow as summer ice, and both days are modest public ceremonies. On festival night the procession ends at this pond, where the collected tags are burned.

An ordinary afternoon in the village

Outside the festival, Yuwaku is quiet. Shirasagi-no-yu is the sōyu (総湯), the communal bath, used by residents who arrive with their own wash baskets; you pay at the entrance, leave your shoes in a locker, and bring a towel or buy one. Expect a fee closer to a neighbourhood bathhouse than a spa, with the current figure and the closing day posted at the door.

Two museums fill the rest of an afternoon. The Kanazawa Yuwaku Yumeji-kan (金沢湯涌夢二館) is devoted to Takehisa Yumeji (竹久夢二), the Taishō-era painter of long-necked, melancholy women, who spent some weeks here with his lover Hikono. A short walk down the valley, Kanazawa Yuwaku Edo-mura (金沢湯涌江戸村) is an open-air collection of relocated Edo-period farmhouses and merchant houses. Both charge admission and close on set days, and their own notices are the source.

Festival night from the pavement

The main night falls in autumn, usually October, and it changes the place. A village with a handful of inns receives visitors in the thousands. The street is lit by the bonbori, a procession carries lanterns from the shrine up to the pond, a priest reads the rite, and the tags burn. It is dark and cold once the sun leaves the valley, and the path between the shrine steps and Gyokusenko is uneven underfoot.

What visitors misjudge is logistics. The valley road has been closed to private cars on the night, with shuttle buses running from parking areas nearer the city, and the inns fill long in advance. Arrangements have differed from year to year, so the organisers' announcement for the current year is the only reliable guide. Come on an ordinary evening in lantern season and you get the lit street, the shrine steps, and very few other people.

Getting there and getting back

Hokutetsu (北陸鉄道) runs the bus from the terminal outside Kanazawa Station's Kenrokuen exit (兼六園口); board the service whose destination reads 湯涌温泉 and ride to the end. Departures are far thinner than on city routes. Photograph the return timetable at the Yuwaku stop before you walk uphill, and ask the operator which payment cards the route takes instead of assuming yours will work.

Come between midsummer and the autumn festival for the lanterns, and in any season for the bath, though the valley holds more snow than central Kanazawa and winter buses can run late. The Yuwaku Onsen tourism association announces the festival date, the lantern period and the tag sales; the city's official tourism site carries museum hours. The mistake to avoid is treating festival night as a casual evening out from Kanazawa. Without a confirmed way back down the valley, or a room booked months ahead, it ends at a bus stop with a long queue and a short timetable.