Jozankei Gensen Park

This guide to Jozankei Gensen Park opens with a raw egg lowered in a wire basket into the spring that gives the park its free hot-spring eggs, cooked entirely by heat rising out of the ground. It traces that water back to Miizumi Jozan, a wandering monk who found this scalding spring on the Toyohira riverbank around 1866 and opened it to anyone who came, then follows how his free bathhouse grew into a whole valley of paid ryokan and bathhouses. Try the foot baths near the egg spring, the one stretch of this valley still free the way Jozan first left it.