Before the war, no matter how high the ryokan, they were all made of wood and the highest they would be is three floors──

In the beginning of the Meiji era, one would fill buckets on the end of a bamboo pole with the Onsen water and then exchange this to pails that were then carried by hand to each ryokan. Eventually, they would build a well in each individual ryokan which would pump the hot spring water up from the ground. However, the freshly pumped water would be too hot to bathe in, so each ryokan would have two baths used in alternation.

Once railroads connected to Wakura Onsen, it became a matter of keeping up with the overwhelming number of guests. They would make a new onsen, increase the water levels and the performance of the pumps, and the ryokan’s would steadily get larger. There wasn’t enough land, so they would fill more land around the island and build new ryokan’s on this new land. Even so, the ryokan at the time were made of wood and up to three stories high. There were many ryokan similar to Togetsu-an lining the streets of Wakura.

In the midst of this prosperity a certain tragedy struck:

Compared to other places where you have to dig thousands of meters to get to the onsen, in Wakura’s case, you only had to dig about 100 meters to get to the hot springs. At that time, they used handheld tools to dig for the water, and there was one time a man had dug only 30 meters when water came gushing forth. The water hit him directly between the legs and he was left with large burns for the rest of his life.

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