SOAN KOSUMOSU Travel Journal

Yufuin Onsen is now well known throughout Japan as a hot spring resort area.

In addition to overnight visitors from faraway places, the area also attracts a very large number of day-trippers and sightseeing tour stopovers from the Fukuoka and Kitakyushu metropolitan areas as well as from all over Kyushu. The atmosphere of the city is great. And recently, great popularity among foreign tourists too.

It was Kumahachi Aburaya, known as the founder of modern hot spring resort development in Beppu, who first turned Yufuin into a hot spring resort. Kumahachi Aburaya loved this quiet hot spring resort located at the foot of Mt. Yufu, and built a private villa in the Taisho era (1912-1926) as "Beppu's backyard," which was the first step toward becoming a hot spring resort.

As if to coincide with this, Dr. Seiroku Honda, a forest scientist, returned from his studies in Germany at the end of the Taisho era with "Romanticism" in tow. In a lecture titled "Yufuin Hot Springs Development Strategies," Honda proposed a plan to create a quiet hot springs resort that incorporates much nature, learning from Baden-Baden in Germany.
In other words, the image of Yufuin as a quiet, rural hot spring resort and hot spring village was actually attached to the area a long time ago.

Morning mist in Yufuin Basin

However, Yufuin was actually a remote hot spring resort town.
The process of transforming it into a town in its own image was the "Town Planning" movement that began in the 1960s. Although the movement would come to fruition as a result, it reached a major turning point when it was picked up by various media outlets.

Numerous efforts have paid off, in November 1981, the Governor Hiramatsu of Oita Prefecture presented the "OVOP (One Village One Product) Movement Encouragement Award" to the Yufuin Hot Springs Tourism Association. In the same year, Yufuin Town was designated as a National Health Hot Spring Resort by the Ministry of the Environment.
In 1987, the Act on Development of Comprehensive Resort Areas (the so-called "Resort Law") was promulgated. The time was the bubble period. The wave of resort development swept over Yufuin.

For Yufuin, which had preserved its rural landscape and never overstressed its position as a hot springs resort, the search for land by outside capital was a troublesome problem that caused land prices to skyrocket. In response, the town of Yufuin enacted the "Enriching Town Development Ordinance" in September 1990.
Based on this ordinance, which clearly states the importance of "growth management" and "emphasis on the development of each region," the town continues to promote the creation of a truly relaxing hot spring resort town.

Mt. Yufu in autumn

Subsequently, even after the bursting of the bubble economy in Japan, the Yufuin brand continued to grow and now enjoys a leading position at the national level when it comes to popular hot spring destinations.
As mentioned above, the brand has taken a position that is attracting attention not only from within Japan, but from around the world as well.