名水百選
The 100 Remarkable Waters of Japan (名水百選, meisui hyakusen) are 100 springs, rivers and wells that Japan's Environment Agency picked in March 1985 as the country's best-kept water, each one looked after by the people who live beside it. Most are springs, from the eight ponds of Oshino Hakkai below Mount Fuji and the wasabi fields of Azumino to the blue underground lakes of Ryusendo cave and the uchinuki of Saijo, where water rises unaided out of pipes driven into the ground. The rest include the Shimanto and Nagara rivers, the sake brewers' wells of Nishinomiya, a shrine well in Fushimi where Kyoto locals fill bottles for tea, and the channel that runs past the old samurai houses of Obata. The list runs from Rishiri Island to Okinawa, with at least one entry in every prefecture. Being on it does not make a water safe to drink: at eleven of them the local authority says to boil it first, and a few are not for drinking at all. As of September 2026 none has dried up for good, though the source of Saitama's Yamatomizu is closed for rockfall risk and the July 2026 Kumamoto earthquake shut the Kikuchi Gorge for six days.
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Voters in the ministry's 2016 poll put it first for both sightseeing and scenery, and at Daio Wasabi Farm you walk between flat wasabi beds with the snowmelt running clear through them.
Half a day from Matsumoto
Mount Fuji rises right behind the eight clear spring ponds, so this is the one for the classic picture, and it fits easily into a day at the Fuji Five Lakes.
A day trip from Tokyo
The one to fit into a Kyoto stay: Gokogu's tap is 4 min on foot from Kintetsu Momoyama-Goryomae Station, the shrine invites you to taste the water, and the Fushimi sake breweries are a short walk away.
Half a day from Kyoto
Minami-Aso's tourism bureau says you can drink this water just as it comes up through the sand of the pool, an official yes that only a handful of the 100 have.
A day trip from Kumamoto
In Ryusendo the water itself is the sight, lit deep blue in the underground lakes of one of Japan's three great limestone caves, and the third lake on the route is 98 m deep.
A full day from Morioka
Grouped by region, north to south. Tick an entry to mark it visited.
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Rain and snow that fell on Mount Yotei decades ago gush out of the ground in Fukidashi Park, about 80,000 tonnes a day at 6.5°C in every season, and this is where Kyogoku gets most of its tap water. The town calls the spring good water but untreated, and asks you to boil any you collect.
The northernmost water on the list rises in forest near the third station of the Oshidomari trail up Mount Rishiri, after 20 to 30 years seeping down through the volcano's rock. Kanro means 'sweet nectar', which is how it struck the people who named it.
Getting there: 20 min walk up the Oshidomari trail from the Rishiri Hokuroku campsite. Best: June to September (hiking season).
More than 60 springs feed this 2.5 km stream, Chitose's main source of tap water, but they lie inside a closed national historic site. Visitors go instead to Meisui Fureai Park downstream, where the fountain runs water already treated at the purification plant next door and you may fill your own bottles.
From September 28 to November 15, 2026, dredging of the river and work at the purification plant close part of the riverside path and part of the car park in Meisui Fureai Park.
Best: Late April to November 15 (the park's open season).
When the Tsugaru lord brought a papermaker from Echizen to Hirosaki in 1686, this was the spring he worked with, and its six basins had fixed uses: the first two for drinking, then rice and greens, then paper stock and pickles, and the last two for laundry and feet. It is a few minutes' walk from Saisho-in's five-storey pagoda.
Legend says the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, sent here by a dream, washed his eyes in this spring and was cured of an eye disease, so 'god of the eyes' (me no kami) wore down into the name Igami. It rises in a small park among apple orchards; boil any you take home, and do not drink it if it looks cloudy.
Visitors walk 700 m of the cave's 4,088 m of known passages, as far as the third of its eight underground lakes, 98 m deep and lit a startling blue (entry ¥1,100). The same water runs from the taps around the cave in Iwaizumi and is sold bottled as Ryusendo no Mizu.
Typhoon No. 15 flooded the walkways in August 2026; the cave closed on the 12th and reopened on the 22nd. High water shuts it without notice: a 2016 typhoon kept it closed for six months, and a flood closed it for two weeks in August 2024.
Best: Winter, when the lakes are at their clearest.
Seven springs at the foot of Mount Iwate share the name, and the largest, Zato Shimizu, runs at a steady 12°C into the rainbow trout tanks of the prefecture's inland fisheries research centre next door. You can look at the fenced source pond any day, but the prefecture says the water can no longer be drunk unboiled.
Katsurappa, as locals call the best known of Takashimizu's seven springs, once drew sake brewers from 13 towns and villages north of Sendai, who hauled it away in 1,800-litre tubs on horse carts and sleds in the winter brewing season. Less water comes up now than in 1985, and it is untreated, so boil it before drinking.
Sendai's river runs through the middle of the city between wild cliffs, and Date Masamune built his castle on the bluff above it in 1601. Postwar sewage drove the fish out of its city stretch until a 1974 ordinance set water standards fit for ayu, and both the ayu and the anglers are back.
Getting there: 5 min walk from Omachi Nishi-koen Station (Sendai Subway Tozai Line) to Ohashi bridge, or 30 min on foot from JR Sendai Station. Our Sendai guide
The old town of Rokugo sits on an alluvial fan dotted with dozens of springs, and residents still use them and clean them together. One, Mitaidokoro Shimizu ('the lord's kitchen'), supplied the cooking and tea water for a rest house of the Satake lords.
The lords of Yuzawa castle drank this water for stamina, and people came to call it 'strength water'. It comes out at the foot of the old castle hill in Chuo Park, about 11 litres a minute at 13°C.
Getting there: 10 min walk from JR Yuzawa Station.
Snowmelt from Gassan's year-round snowfields soaks down through virgin beech forest and resurfaces in springs around Shizu, and a Nishikawa company bottles some of it as Gassan Shizensui.
Best: Mid-May to early June (fresh beech leaves against the last snow).
The Omigawa runs just 2.2 km from Jizo pond, a spring pool at the foot of the Midare River fan, and 400 m of it is protected as a prefectural natural monument for the kakuretomiyo living there. This 4–6 cm stickleback builds its nest from water plants and was recognised as a species of its own only in 2021, a year before Higashine made it the city fish.
Ryugasawa, the main spring and a national historic site, has never failed even in the worst droughts, and rain-making rites were held at it from ancient times until just after the Second World War. Its water is piped down to the Enichi-ji temple museum, where people come to fill bottles throughout the day.
Getting there: 10 min walk from the trail car park above the Enichi-ji museum.
Praised long ago as a spring 'not to be traded for a hundred kan of coin', Hyakkan Shimizu still pushes up through white sand in beech forest that shows no sign of ever being logged, on the slopes of Nishi-Azuma. The stream it starts drops over Onogawa Fudo Falls on its way to Lake Onogawa.
Getting there: On foot along the Wasezawa-Decodaira trail, from the top of the Urabandai Ropeway at Grandeco or from the Wasezawa trailhead at the end of an unpaved forest road. Best: Fresh green in late spring, foliage in October.
Tokugawa Mitsukuni, lord of Mito, is credited with naming the five springs around the eighth station of Mount Yamizo (1,022 m), Ibaraki's highest peak, and with liking Kinshosui best. Daigo town does not test the water and will not recommend it for drinking.
Best: April to November (the town's forest road up closes December to March).
Water from the limestone hill behind wells up into this clear pond, a prefectural natural monument and the source of the Izuru River, with a vermilion Benten hall set into the rock face above. Carp cruise over the spring, and the local legend of the rich man Asahi Choja says his lost daughter became one of them.
Shojinzawa puts out 65,000 tonnes a day at a steady 11°C from a dozen or more outlets in old-growth forest on the flank of Mount Shakagatake. The name was once written with the characters for 'purification stream', from the Nara-period tradition that mountain worshippers cleansed themselves here before climbing.
Getting there: 30 min walk from the Shojinzawa car park, over a low ridge and a suspension bridge; the car park is 30 min by taxi from JR Yaita Station.
The Oda clan reshaped this channel between 1629 and 1642, when they moved their seat to Obata. It still runs through the old samurai and merchant quarters, past at least 47 washing places on its banks, and on to the rice fields north of town.
Getting there: 5 min by taxi from Joshu-Fukushima Station (Joshin Electric Railway). Best: Early April (cherry blossom along the channel).
The spring pours from the roots of the great cedar beside Hakoshima Fudo temple, about 30,000 tonnes a day, and becomes the Narusawa River, which supplies the town's drinking water and trout farms. Legend ties it to Lake Haruna: a memorial tablet sunk in the lake surfaced here, and the temple still keeps it.
Getting there: 30 min walk from JR Onogami Station (Agatsuma Line). Best: June to late July (fireflies along the stream below).
In the legend behind Yamatomizu, the hero Yamato Takeru drove his sword into a cliff on Mount Kamabuse and water gushed out, so cold he could manage only one cup, which is why it is also called Ippaisui, 'one-cup water'. It feeds the Fuppu River, followed for 3.4 km by a path that crosses the stream on stepping stones, and the slopes above hold mandarin orchards famous as the northern limit for mikan in Japan.
The source on Mount Kamabuse has been off-limits since May 2002 because of rockfall risk. The same water can be collected at the town's Yamatomizu water point nearby.
Getting there: 10 min walk from Hakure Station (Chichibu Railway) to the river; the Yamatomizu water point is 5 km uphill by road, realistically a drive. Best: Mid-October to mid-December (mikan picking in the orchards).
Kobo Daishi, the old tale goes, called this spring out of the ground for farmers who had no water, and for about a century from the Muromachi period it fed a healing bathhouse run by Kamakura's Tsurugaoka Hachimangu. Today it waters the rice fields below at 48 litres a minute, and Chonan town says it is not fit for drinking and must be boiled if you drink it anyway.
Springs seep from the foot of the Kokubunji cliff line into a clear stream, and 350 m of the lane beside it is a footpath named for the Owari Tokugawa lords, who kept these villages as hawking grounds in the Edo period. Masugata ('true form') pond takes its name from a tale of 848 in which the beauty Tamatsukuri no Komachi washed in it and was cured, her looks restored; the city asks visitors not to drink the water.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Kokubunji Station (south exit), or 12 min from JR Nishi-Kokubunji Station (south exit). Best: Late November to early December (autumn leaves).
The Tama River runs white between boulders below Mitake, and a path of about 4 km follows both banks, past canoes in the rapids and the Gyokudo Art Museum, devoted to the painter Kawai Gyokudo, who spent his last years here. Thirty minutes downstream on foot is the riverside Sawanoi sake brewery.
Getting there: The riverside path is a 5 min walk from JR Mitake Station (Ome Line).
Hadano opened Japan's third modern waterworks in 1890, fed by springs, and still draws 70 percent of its tap water from the ground. Kobo no Shimizu, its best-known spring, was found polluted with tetrachloroethylene in 1989 and declared revived in 2004; the city tests it every year, but whether to drink it, and whether to boil it first, is left to you.
Getting there: Kobo no Shimizu is a 5 min walk from Odakyu Hadano Station.
Shasui drops in three steps of 69, 16 and 29 m, and from a red footbridge you see the 69 m fall whole, though the plunge pool beyond is closed for safety. Tradition says the Kamakura-era monk Mongaku trained under it for 100 days, and on the fourth Sunday of July the Fudo hall on the approach holds a fire festival with taiko drumming.
Getting there: 35 min walk from JR Yamakita Station (Gotemba Line).
Thirty tonnes of water a minute well up at 6.5 to 6.9°C into this 1.2-hectare pond in beech and cedar woods, enough to replace all of it within a day, and the town keeps a free drinking-water point a minute from the car park. In the village tale, starving villagers stole a dragon's egg, and the mother, moved when they begged her to spare their children, made it rain for three days and nights to fill the hollow.
Best: Late spring to autumn (closed in winter; the 2025 season opened on May 11).
The forest around this spring was long kept as a sacred grove where a god lived, and the source is still off-limits so that nothing disturbs it. The soft water comes out beside Todo no Mori Meisui Park, about 2,000 tonnes a day even in dry summers, and you can fill containers all year, even while the park buildings are shut from December to mid-April.
Groundwater from the Kurobe River's alluvial fan comes back up along the coast at Ikuji as shozu springs, and residents still look after ten shared washing places, each split into basins used in order from the top: drinking water, cooling, cooking, laundry. In neighbouring Nyuzen, 2.67 hectares of cedar standing in spring water by the sea are all that survive of the coastal woods cleared for rice paddies in the 1970s.
Getting there: 30 min walk from Ikuji Station (Ainokaze Toyama Railway).
Water runs out of a cave behind a stone Yakushi Buddha at the bottom of a wooded valley, 108 steps below the approach, and people have come for it as healing water since the monk Hakushin from Mino trained in the cave for three years from 1851. The site is open daily from 8:00 to 17:00 (to 16:00 from December to February), with a paid lift to haul full containers back up the steps.
Best: January, the season of kan no mizu (midwinter water).
The highest water on the list comes out at 2,450 m on the Murodo plateau, released when the Alpine Route's tunnel was bored through Tateyama. It runs at 2 tonnes a day and 2–5°C even in midsummer, and hikers and day-trippers drink from the fountain there.
Getting there: Beside Murodo terminal on the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route. Best: April 15 to November 30, while the Alpine Route runs. Our Toyama guide
Shakunyo, the priest who founded Zuisen-ji temple in 1390, was resting here, the story goes, when his horse's hoof sank into the ground and a spring welled up in the print; a melon the villagers chilled in it for him split open from the cold, so he named it 'melon-splitting'. It runs beside an old highway, and in winter, being warmer than the river, it was where people washed the local leeks dug out of the snow.
Kobo-ike rises through a pothole, a round hollow that a river scoured into the rock long ago and that now sits at ground level, which is why it is also called Kama-ike, 'pot pond'. Local legend says Kobo Daishi pushed his staff into the rock to thank a kind old woman, and Hakusan city tests the water but does not officially offer it for drinking.
Legend says a dragon god showed Keizan, founder of the Zen temple Sojiji, where this water would rise in the forest 5 km up the valley from Monzen, and the temple has long used it for the tea and hot water offered at its altars. The name comes from a tale of a farmer who got tipsy on the water while his son, tasting the same spring, got only water: 'ko wa shudo', 'for the son, spring water'.
The January 2024 Noto earthquake collapsed the cloister and a hall at Sojiji Soin in Monzen, which owns the spring. We found no report on the state of the spring or the forest road to it as of September 2026; check with Wajima City's Monzen office before going.
Emperor Shomu's crown prince, tradition says, had an eye disease treated with the water of this spring pond in the woods of Akakura Shrine, and a later tale has a defeated warlord riding his horse into its depths, with a red saddle rising to the surface before dawn every New Year's Day. It still irrigates about 20 hectares of rice, and Nanao City advises boiling it before you drink it.
Getting there: 10 min by car from Tatsuruhama Station (Noto Railway), or a 3 km walk.
Named, like Toyama's Uriwari Shozu, for water cold enough to split a melon, this spring breaks out of the rock in the woods behind Tentoku-ji and tumbles as a small fall, 4,500 tonnes a day, over stones stained red by a rare alga. Bottled as Wakasa Uriwari no Mizu, it came second for taste in the ministry's 2016 poll, and filling your own containers to take home costs a ¥300 cleaning fee.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Kaminaka Station (Obama Line). Best: June, when about 10,000 hydrangeas bloom in the park.
At the foot of the hill below Echizen Ono Castle, the 'honourable spring' once supplied the water for cooking the lord's rice, which is why it is also called Tonosama Shimizu, 'the lord's spring'. The samurai households around it drew from it in a fixed order, drinking water at the top, then cooling fruit, then washing vegetables, and the neighbours who look after it still keep that rule.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Echizen-Ono Station (Etsumi-hoku Line). Best: July to August, when the flow is strongest and paper lanterns light the pool on summer evenings.
On the night of March 2 a torchlit procession carries sacred water 2 km from Jingu-ji and pours it into this pool on the Onyu River, and the story is that it flows underground for ten days to the Wakasa well at Todai-ji in Nara, in time for the Omizutori there on March 12. Anyone can walk in the procession by reserving a hand torch (¥2,500) through the Wakasa Obama tourist office.
Best: March 2 (Omizuokuri).
Snowmelt from Mount Fuji spends decades filtering through lava before it wells up in these eight ponds, a national natural monument since 1934 and part of the Fuji World Heritage Site since 2013. Waku-ike, which has the strongest flow, faces a water mill and souvenir shops on the busiest street, while Deguchi-ike, the largest pond, sits apart with no shops and far fewer people.
At Sanbuichi ('one third') a triangular stone, placed by Takeda Shingen according to tradition, still sits in the channel and splits the spring three ways, so each village downstream gets the same share of irrigation water. Otaki pours about 22,000 tonnes a day from a hollowed-log spout in the grounds of Otaki Shrine, and Hokuto City says the group's water is for farming, not for drinking unboiled.
Getting there: Sanbuichi is under 1 km on foot from Kai-Koizumi Station (JR Koumi Line); Otaki is a 2 km walk from JR Kobuchizawa Station.
Water filtered through the granite of Kai-Komagatake runs emerald-green down this gorge, named Ojira, 'white tail', after the sacred white-tailed horse of a local legend. The first pool, Senga-buchi, is an easy 15 min from the car park by Chiku Komagatake Shrine, but beyond it the rest of the three-hour round trip to Fudo Falls, past the three-tiered Shinja Falls, is a mountain trail that calls for boots.
Getting there: 30 min by taxi from JR Kobuchizawa, Nagasaka or Hinoharu Station (Chuo Line). Best: Late October to November (autumn leaves); the gorge path is closed from mid-December to mid-April.
Tradition says the tea master Fuzoan Ryukei found this soft spring at the foot of Mount Kazakoshi after following the Tenryu River upstream in search of the perfect water for tea, and that in the early 1800s the lord of Iida Castle sent a rider for it every morning. It runs from a pipe in the rock along a trough to a spout by the path, where you can drink it on the spot.
Because of bear sightings since 2025, the preservation society has cancelled its public open-air tea for 2026 (groups of five or more can still book it, ¥500 each). Instead it serves free sencha and coffee at the spring on the 2nd and 4th Sundays from May to October, 10:00–13:00, except in rain.
Getting there: 10 min by taxi from JR Iida Station (Iida Line).
Northern Alps snowmelt resurfaces here at 700,000 tonnes a day, never above 15°C even in midsummer, and has fed flat wasabi beds since the Taisho era, among them Daio Wasabi Farm, Japan's largest, where the water wheels from Kurosawa's Dreams still stand on the Tade River. Azumino City says the spring water by Azumino no Sato, a cluster of restaurants and lodgings, is drinkable, and people come with bottles to take it home.
Getting there: Daio Wasabi Farm is a 30 min walk or 10 min taxi ride from JR Hotaka Station (Oito Line). Best: Late March to early May, when the wasabi flowers.
Springs at 8°C well up on a small flat just over the watershed from Lake Aoki, and from the boardwalk you can watch them gather into the Hime River, which reaches the Sea of Japan 58 km later. The protected source is thick with fukujuso (Amur adonis) in April, and a 90-minute loop runs through the reserve, which takes in the Oyomi marsh next door.
Getting there: 10 min walk from JR Minami-Kamishiro Station (Oito Line) to the entrance. Best: April (fukujuso flowers). Our Hakuba guide
In 1471 the linked-verse poet Sogi and his teacher, the Gujo lord To Tsuneyori, exchanged farewell poems beside this spring, and that parting gave it its other name, Hakuunsui ('white cloud water'). It fills a sunken basin divided by use, and the neighbourhood, which drew its daily water here until the mains came, still washes vegetables for winter pickles in it and cleans it every Friday morning.
Getting there: 1.5 km walk from Gujo-Hachiman Station (Nagaragawa Railway). Best: August 20, the Sogisui festival night of the Gujo Odori.
Satsukimasu, the sea-run form of the amago trout, swim up this stretch through Mino, Seki and Gifu in spring and ayu fill it in summer, and Gifu City pumps all its tap water from the ground, most of it water the Nagara has fed underground. After dark in the fishing season, cormorant boats work the river by the light of fire baskets, at Gifu and at Oze in Seki.
Best: May 11 to October 15 (cormorant fishing). Our Gifu guide
Japan's Yoro era, begun in 717, takes its name, 'nourishing old age', from this spring: in the legend its water tasted of sake and made a poor woodcutter's old father young again, and Empress Gensho came to bathe in it. Kikusuisen rises in the grounds of Yoro Shrine, and the 30 m Yoro Falls is 500 m further up the valley path.
Getting there: 35 min uphill walk from Yoro Station (Yoro Railway).
Kakitagawa is only 1.2 km long and made almost entirely of spring water: rain and snow from Mount Fuji seep through the Mishima lava flow and burst up under Route 1 at about 15°C, a million tonnes or more a day, and part of it is piped as tap water to five towns and cities in eastern Shizuoka. From the decks in Kakitagawa Park you can watch sand churning in the vents; the river has been a national natural monument since 2011, and since 1988 a donor-funded trust has been buying land along it to keep development away.
Best: May to September (Mishima baikamo flowers).
The listed stretch is the Kiso's last gorge, about 15 km of chert cliffs and boulders from Inuyama bridge, just upstream of the castle, to where the Kani River joins. The river only settled into this course after the great flood of 1586, and it now supplies tap water to Inuyama and the rest of the Owari region, Nagoya included.
Getting there: Meitetsu Inuyama-yuen Station is beside Inuyama bridge, at the lower end of the listed stretch. Our Nagoya guide
Chishaku was a drought-prone village that long quarrelled with its upstream neighbour over water, so people here write the name of this 1.8 km spring-fed channel with the character for 'nourish' rather than 'use', and it served them for everything from washing rice to bathing. When it had been neglected and fouled, the children's club began releasing carp and cleaning it in 1972, and carp still swim through the village in its clear water.
Getting there: 3 min walk from Kintetsu Sakura Station (Yunoyama Line) to the channel's memorial park.
Legend makes this cave in the forested limestone hills between Ise and Shima the Ama-no-Iwato, where the sun goddess Amaterasu hid and left the world in darkness, and 31,000 tonnes of water a day pour out of it towards the reservoir that fills the Shima peninsula's taps. The twice-yearly tests sometimes find coliform bacteria, so Shima City asks you to boil any you take for drinking.
Getting there: 10 min by taxi from Kintetsu Shima-Isobe Station; large vehicles cannot use the last 2 km of road.
By the late 1600s this corner spring was counted among the three famous waters east of Lake Biwa, and the little hexagonal hall in the middle of its stone-fenced pond holds a Jizo that mothers pray to for milk. Its natural flow has fallen since about 1986, so the residents' preservation society keeps the pond topped up with a pump, and says its yearly test finds the water fit to drink, though it is not chlorinated.
Getting there: 15 min walk from JR Minami-Hikone Station.
Izumi Shrine sits on a spring of Mount Ibuki water that threads through the limestone to well up in its grounds, about 4,500 tonnes a day at 11°C, and it is also remembered as one of the springs where the hero Yamato Takeru recovered after the god of Mount Ibuki made him ill. The villagers have set up a collection point away from the source itself, and people drive in from well beyond Maibara to fill containers.
Getting there: 15 min by taxi from JR Omi-Nagaoka Station.
In 862, the story goes, water with a sweet fragrance welled up here and cured those who drank it, and Emperor Seiwa named the shrine Gokogu, 'the fragrant shrine', after it. Locals still fill bottles for tea and calligraphy a short walk from the Fushimi sake breweries, and the shrine invites you to taste the water at its tap, open 7:00 to 19:00.
Getting there: 4 min walk from Kintetsu Momoyama-Goryomae Station. Our Kyoto guide
On the pine-covered Amanohashidate sandbar, with the sea on both sides, this well has never tasted of salt, and a poem credited to the Heian poet Izumi Shikibu says that if it were in the capital, you would draw from it too. It is not for drinking today; it serves as the hand-washing water of Amanohashidate Shrine beside it.
Getting there: 15 min walk from Amanohashidate Station (Kyoto Tango Railway).
Osaka's only entry is a well in the grounds of Minase Shrine, which stands where the retired emperor Go-Toba had his country palace; its water was first kept for offerings to the gods and later drawn for the tea ceremony. The tap runs from 6:00 to 17:00, and anyone who has filled 20 litres goes back to the end of the queue.
Getting there: 15 min walk from Hankyu Minase Station, 18 min from JR Shimamoto Station.
Yamamura Tazaemon, who brewed sake in both Nishinomiya and Uozaki, worked out in 1840 that his Nishinomiya sake was better because of the water, and Nada's brewers were soon sinking wells into this shallow, hard, almost iron-free groundwater southeast of Nishinomiya Shrine. The wells are brewery property and the water is not given out, but you can stand at the monument by his Umenoki well and look into the Miyamizu garden three breweries made around theirs.
Getting there: 10 min walk south of Hanshin Nishinomiya Station to the monument.
Right behind Shin-Kobe Station the Nunobiki gorge drops through four falls that poets have written about since the Heian period, the biggest of them the 43 m Ontaki, and there is nowhere along it to draw the water. Further up, the Nunobiki dam of 1900, the first concrete gravity dam built in Japan, still holds part of Kobe's supply, the water sailors once prized as 'Kobe water' because it stayed fresh on long voyages.
Getting there: 15 min walk from Shin-Kobe Station to Ontaki, the main fall. Our Kobe guide
The Chikusa runs about 70 km from Enami Pass, where Hyogo meets Okayama and Tottori, to the Harima Sea at Ako, with little of its course altered by people. For half a century schoolchildren and residents have sampled its insects and other water life every summer to judge its health, and after the 50th survey, of 46 sites in 2022, the organisers said its richness is slowly declining.
Three springs rise around Dorogawa, the hot-spring village at the foot of Mount Omine: Izumi no Mori in a cave behind old sacred trees at the village entrance, the cave stream of Shinsendo, which cannot be collected, and Gorogoro-sui, named for the rumble of water running through the limestone underground. Gorogoro-sui has a managed collection point (¥500, parking included), and Tenkawa Village asks you to heat the water before drinking it and to use it soon.
For centuries, travellers on the Kumano Kodo's Nakahechi route have stopped at this spring below Tsugizakura-oji, which has never failed in a drought though the hillside around it is short of water. Stones beside it carry a 1705 haiku by Basho's disciple Hattori Ransetsu and a tanka Saito Mokichi wrote on a visit in 1934.
Getting there: Bus from JR Kii-Tanabe Station to the Nonaka Ipposugi stop, then a 1.5 km walk uphill along Route 311. Our Wakayama guide
Kimii-dera, temple 2 of the Saigoku pilgrimage, is named for its three wells, Seijosui, Yoryusui and Kisshosui. Seijosui, a small fall in the trees to the right of the first flight of steps, has long been drawn for tea, ikebana and calligraphy ink, and in 1922 it was carried to the lodgings of the future Emperor Showa for his cooking.
Getting there: 10 min walk from JR Kimiidera Station. Best: Late March to early April, when Wakayama's weather observatory declares cherry season from the temple's own Somei-yoshino. Our Wakayama guide
Ame no Manai, 'heaven's sacred well', is the highest form of manai, the word for a sacred well in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. About 2,500 tonnes a day rise here at 14°C all year, cold in summer and warm in winter, and the stream runs past a thatched water-mill hut on its way to Yodoe's homes, fields and rainbow-trout farms.
Getting there: 10 min by car from JR Yodoe Station (3 km on foot).
When the monk Gyoki came to Nakanoshima in the Nara period, the legend goes, he felt something holy in the water running from a shaded grotto here, founded a temple to Kannon beside it and named the spring Tengawa, 'heaven's river'. It has never run dry and still gives about 400 tonnes a day, which once fed a village water supply and now fills the temple pond and waters the rice fields across the road.
Getting there: Island bus (Ama line) to the Hobomi stop, then a 7 min walk.
Two falls, the 50 m male fall on the right and the 40 m female fall on the left, pour down a cliff of old trachyte lava on either side of Dangyo Shrine, at the end of a cedar-lined approach on Dogo, the largest of the Oki Islands. Islanders call its water the water of victory, and those taking part in the island's bullfights and classical sumo purify themselves with it before they compete.
Because of rockfall risk, the path beyond the Zuishin-mon gate is closed, so you cannot reach the shrine or walk behind the male fall, though the falls can still be seen (September 2026).
Getting there: 50 min by car from Saigo port; come in from the Naku (coast) side, as the road across the island is rough.
At the foot of Naka-Hiruzen, water wells up at 11°C and 300 litres a second into a gourd-shaped pool 12 m by 5 m and 1.9 m at its deepest, and it still supplies about 600 households. You may not fill bottles at the pool itself, but there is a tap for that beside the lodge of the Hiruzen Shiogama Camping Village, a few minutes' walk away.
Omachi, the district that gave its name to Omachi sake rice, had prized water long before: in 1686 the Okayama lord Ikeda Tsunamasa had a well sunk here into the underflow of the Asahi River and kept it for his own household, with a guard post watching it. The old well cannot be drawn from, so the city pumps the same groundwater to a tap in Omachi Aqua Garden, and it warns that this raw water carries manganese above the tap-water limit and sometimes bacteria, E. coli included.
Getting there: 1.6 km walk from JR Higashi-Okayama Station to Omachi Aqua Garden (9:00–18:00, closed the 1st and 3rd Fridays). Our Okayama guide
The spring seeps from under a rock 100 m short of Iwai Falls, a 10 m fall you can walk behind, at 830 m in the forest near the Tottori border. A childless couple, the story goes, were told by the Fudo of the falls to drink it for 21 days and had a daughter the next July 10, which is why the falls festival is held on that date.
Typhoon No. 7 rains in August 2023 broke up the path and the forest road to the falls, and the site stayed closed until repairs were finished; it reopened to visitors on August 8, 2026.
Getting there: 60 min by car from Innosho IC (Chugoku Expressway), then a 400 m path with some steep steps from the free car park. Best: Mid-April to mid-December (the road is closed under snow from late December to early April).
This 18 km stretch of the Ota, from the Yukimori River confluence above Kabe down to the Gion sluice where the river splits to cross Hiroshima's delta, runs at 40 cubic metres a second in normal flow. It supplies tap water to Hiroshima and the towns around it, its banks are lined with parks, and the ayu season opens on June 1.
Getting there: The Gion sluice is 800 m (10 min) on foot from JR Aki-Nagatsuka Station (Kabe Line). Our Hiroshima guide
Under a small shrine to the water god, the water comes up into basins that still show the old rule for using it: drinking water at the top, then rice and vegetables, then laundry. Since the flow dwindled it has not been fit to drink, and in 2012 old maps showed the town that the 1985 listing had used the name of Deai Shimizu, a different spring 120 m away.
Getting there: 1.9 km walk (25 min) from JR Tenjingawa Station.
Beppu Itsukushima Shrine keeps this blue-green spring pond in its grounds, out in the karst country of Akiyoshidai, and the pond's 14°C spring water goes on to local homes, the rice fields and the city trout farm next door; catch a rainbow trout there and the restaurants by the pond will cook it. Because it is the neighbourhood's drinking water, putting hands or feet in the pond is forbidden.
Getting there: 25 min by car from Mine IC (Chugoku Expressway). Best: Early September, when the Beppu nenbutsu dance is offered in thanks for the water.
Tsuzu's village well has never run dry in a drought and long served the village and the ships passing on the Inland Sea. Tradition in Iwakuni says the domain's first lord, Kikkawa Hiroie, retired nearby and rated it the equal of Yanagi no Mizu, the imperial palace's water in Kyoto, and the tea master Ueda Soko, a senior retainer of the Asano lords of Hiroshima, used it for his tea.
Getting there: 10 min walk from JR Tsuzu Station (Sanyo Line).
The Jakuchi River starts on Mount Jakuchi, at 1,337 m the highest peak in Yamaguchi, and drops through beech and cedar forest over the five Goryu falls, with a path that climbs past all of them in about an hour there and back. Amago and iwana trout live in the stream, and beside the lowest fall, the 15 m Ryubi, is a spring called Enrei no Mizu, 'water of long life'.
Rockfall has closed one of the gorge's four walking courses (Course C), and in June 2026 the path to the Kiuma tunnel was also shut; the Goryu falls course was open.
Getting there: Bus from Nishikicho Station (Nishikigawa Seiryu Line) to Jakuchikyo-iriguchi, 60 min, or 25 min by car from Yoshiwa IC (Chugoku Expressway).
A prefectural natural monument since 1954, the Egawa spring runs against the seasons, at about 10°C in summer and over 20°C in winter, so water lilies flower in it in the cold months. The favoured explanation is that water from the Yoshino River takes half a year to seep here underground, arriving warm in winter and cool in summer, but no one has proved it.
Getting there: 10 min walk from JR Nishi-Oe Station (Tokushima Line).
The source of the Iya River seeps from under a 50 m rock near Otsurugi Shrine, just below the 1,955 m summit of Mount Tsurugi, a short detour off the shrine trail. People have long called it water that cures illness and makes you young.
Getting there: Chairlift from Minokoshi to Nishijima (15 min), then about 1 km on foot by the Otsurugi Shrine trail. Best: Mid-April to November, while the chairlift runs.
On an island that runs short of water most years, this spring on the forested flank of Mount Yubune has never stopped in a drought, and its 400 tonnes a day feed the 800 or so paddies of the Nakayama Senmaida terraces below. Water tests have found E. coli in it.
Best: Mid-June, after rice planting. Our Takamatsu guide
Drive a pipe into the ground in central Saijo and Kamo River water comes up out of it on its own, which is why the old town still has no mains supply: homes draw from their own wells, and Saijo has some 3,000 of them. Tested every year by the city, which calls it safe to drink, the water won a national tasting contest in 1995 and again in 1996.
Getting there: Public spouts stand in front of JR Iyo-Saijo Station and around the town centre.
Legend makes this pond the place where Kobo Daishi, thirsty on his travels, struck his staff (jo) into the ground and brought up water, and his statue now stands in it. Teiregi, a small cress Matsuyama serves with sashimi, grows in the water as a city natural monument, and a stone by the pond carries Masaoka Shiki's haiku about it.
Getting there: 800 m on foot from Sairin-ji, temple 48 of the Shikoku pilgrimage. Best: Spring (cherry blossom). Our Matsuyama guide
By local tradition, the Hyodo clan, who held this valley in the late 16th century, set up a statue of Kannon here after a pilgrimage to Kyoto's Kiyomizu-dera, and water began to run from the limestone cave in the cedar wood above. People queue with containers on holidays for this 14°C water, some 8,000 tonnes a day, and in summer the Meisui-tei stall sends nagashi-somen down it.
Getting there: 20 min by car from JR Unomachi Station. Best: May to August, when Meisui-tei serves nagashi-somen (weekends and holidays only in May and June, closed Mondays in July and August).
Shikoku's longest river runs 196 km to the Pacific under low chinkabashi bridges built without railings, so that floodwater and driftwood pass straight over them, and since 1998 Kochi Prefecture and the riverside towns have had a policy of keeping 48 of them. On summer nights fishermen still drive ayu into their nets with burning torches swung over the water, the method called hiburi-ryo.
The child emperor Antoku, in the legend Ochi tells, escaped the Taira defeat of 1185 and lived out his short life on Mount Yokogura, drinking from this spring; the Imperial Household Agency still keeps a site near the summit as one of five possible tombs for him. Tests have found coliform bacteria, and the town advises against drinking the water unboiled.
Getting there: By car to Mount Yokogura's third car park (9 km from central Ochi), then a 10 min walk.
The Zen temple Kiyomizu-dera grew, by its founding story, out of the hut a wandering monk from Hitachi built beside this spring in 1249, and the water still wells up in its grounds at 17°C all year. Filling bottles is free, with ¥100 or more asked for upkeep, and a Jizo statue nicknamed the 'Regent Jizo' for its pompadour has lately become a draw of its own.
Getting there: 5 min by car or a 2.8 km walk from JR Ukiha Station. Best: Autumn, when the temple's leaves turn.
Kashii-gu tradition credits this well with the 300-year life of Takeuchi no Sukune, who drew from it to cook and brew sake for Emperor Chuai and Empress Jingu, and its water was once sent to the imperial court with sprigs of the shrine's sacred Ayasugi cedar. Fukuoka City says to boil it before drinking.
Getting there: 13 min walk from JR Kashii-Jingu Station. Our Fukuoka guide
Water seeping from all over the Kurokami range runs down the Ryumon gorge, under crags where legend has the archer Minamoto no Tametomo killing a giant serpent, into Ryumon Dam, which holds Arita's tap water. A path follows the stream up the gorge to the 516 m summit of Mount Kurokami, home to rare plants such as the Kurokami orchid, found nowhere else.
Getting there: 15 min by taxi from JR Arita Station. Best: Spring cherry blossom and autumn leaves. Our Saga guide
Kiyomizu Falls drops 75 m down a sheer cliff at the head of this stream, and the stone beside it, set up in 1787, honours a retainer who froze to death praying under the falls for his sick lord. On the path below, a row of restaurants serves koi no arai, raw carp sliced thin and rinsed in the stream's cold water.
Getting there: 15 min by taxi from JR Ogi Station. Best: Late May to early June, when Genji fireflies fill the Gion River downstream.
In 1792, when an earthquake during the Unzen eruption brought down the face of Mount Mayuyama, springs broke out all over Shimabara, and the hollow they filled became Shirachi Lake, which still wells up an estimated 40,000 tonnes a day. Spring water runs in channels past the samurai houses and through Shinmachi, where residents first released carp in 1978, and at Hamanokawa four basins are still used in order, food at the top and dishes below.
Getting there: Shimabara Railway to Shimabara Station; the carp streets are a 1.1 km walk, the samurai-house channel 1.4 km. Our Nagasaki guide
More than 30 waterfalls step down this gorge in the Tara range, from Yoryu Falls, which hangs a rainbow in its spray, to the roaring Todoroki Falls. The water stays at 14°C all year and goes on down the Sakai River to supply rice fields and homes on the plain.
Isahaya City closed the gorge after an earthquake on August 12, 2026 and partly reopened it on August 13. Since a 2020 rockfall killed two walkers on a gorge path, the city shuts the area without notice for the whole rainy season, during heavy-rain and storm warnings, and after any earthquake of shindo 4 or more, so check its notices before you go.
Getting there: 15 min by car from JR Yue Station. Best: May for fresh green; late July and August for cool air.
Hosokawa Yukitaka, the first lord of Uto, had this spring piped 4.8 km to his castle town in the 17th century, and in the Meiwa era (1764–1772) a later lord replaced the worn pottery pipes with pipes cut from local Umakado stone. Those stone pipes still supply homes nearby, making this the oldest waterworks in Japan still in use, and the spring gives 4,200 litres a minute.
The M7.1 earthquake that struck Kumamoto on July 28, 2026 left much of Uto without tap water, and residents queued here with containers. Part of the stone fence around the pool collapsed, and the water, brown just after the quake, had largely cleared by July 31.
Getting there: 5 min by taxi from JR Uto Station, or a 4 km walk.
Sixty tonnes of water a minute, at 14°C all year, well up through the sand of a pool beside Shirakawa Yoshimi Shrine, and this is the head spring of the Shirakawa, the river that runs on through Kumamoto city. There is a ¥100 conservation fee, and Minami-Aso's tourism bureau says you can drink the water as it is, though any you take home should be drunk soon.
Getting there: 10 min walk from Minami-Aso Shirakawa-suigen Station (Minami-Aso Railway).
The Kikuchi River starts here, in a gorge of old broadleaf forest where the water, averaging 13°C even in summer, slides over rock ledges into pools and falls such as the cobalt-blue Ryugafuchi, home to a dragon in local legend. Entry is ¥500 from high-school age (staffed April to November, 8:30 to 17:00), and swimming is banned because the current is fast.
Closed from July 29, 2026 after the Kumamoto earthquake and reopened at 8:30 on August 4. The gorge also shuts when a typhoon approaches, during heavy-rain or strong-wind warnings and after rockfalls; after the 2016 earthquakes it stayed closed until March 2018.
Best: Mid-July to August, when shafts of sunlight reach into the gorge; autumn for the leaves.
A shrine to the water god stands in the middle of this pool, ringed by old cedars, and 30 tonnes a minute well up into it at 13.5°C before running on by way of the Tamarai and Ono rivers to Beppu Bay. The village uses it for drinking water, so it asks visitors to keep hands, feet and cameras out of the pool.
Getting there: Realistically a car trip: 20 km (30 min by taxi) from JR Miyaji Station. Best: Mid-June, when fireflies fly over the pool.
Oike pond lies 850 m up in the old forest of Kurodake, and the groundwater that feeds it, about 20,000 tonnes a day at a steady 12.6°C, has spent more than a year underground. Pay the ¥100 cleaning fee at the hut by the car park: the left-hand path reaches the spring in a few minutes, where people fill containers, and the right-hand one takes 20 minutes through the forest.
Since a typhoon in August 2024 you cannot reach Meisui Falls, the pair of small falls the spring water forms 10 min along the path from the entrance; the pond and its two paths are open.
Getting there: 40 min by car from JR Tenjinyama Station (Kyudai Line). Best: April to November (winter roads can be icy or snowy).
Taketa's biggest spring, Kawauda in Irita, is one of more than 50 around the town, and people come every day to fill containers at its roadside tap. The enoha trout raised in its water are a local dish, and in summer the spring runs straight into a river pool next door that stays about 16°C.
Getting there: 10 min by car from JR Bungo-Taketa Station (Kawauda spring). Best: Mid-July to early September (river pool).
Coming down from Mount Katamuki, the Hakusan runs over a bed of welded tuff, volcanic ash that fused under its own heat, past huge boulders and cliffs that seep groundwater. By the road 2 km short of the Inazumi underwater limestone cave stands Hoge-iwa, a rock with a hole that, the story goes, a demon dug, and next to it the stone marking the meisui.
Getting there: 20 min by car from JR Bungo-Mie-machi Station to the Inazumi cave. Best: Late May to mid-June (fireflies).
Idenoyama pond, Kobayashi's largest reservoir, takes in a tonne of Kirishima spring water a second, and the park's restaurants serve carp, trout and sturgeon, a fish the prefectural fisheries station next door hatched in this water. Legend says Princess Izumi served the spring's water to Emperor Keiko, fell in love, and drowned herself in the pond after he went back to the capital.
Getting there: 10 min by car from JR Kobayashi Station. Best: Late May to early June (fireflies; a festival path opens for four days).
Aya's meisui is not one spring but all the water that runs out of its evergreen laurel forest, gathering into the Ayakita and Ayaminami rivers. To see the forest from above, cross the Teruha suspension bridge, 250 m long and 142 m over the Ayaminami (¥500, 9:00 to 17:00).
Every stream running off Yakushima's mountains counts, from Miyanoura-dake (1,936 m, the highest peak in Kyushu) down, and up there the rain is put at more than 10,000 mm a year. The charter the island's towns adopted in 1993, just before World Heritage listing, makes water its yardstick: the first article sets the goal of good water to drink anywhere, at any time.
Rain that falls 600 m up Kurinodake spends 35 years underground before surfacing in this pond beside Kurino Station, 59,000 tonnes a day, and it supplies the household water of almost the whole Kurino district. The outflow runs under the station through a twin-arched brick culvert built in 1903.
Getting there: Beside JR Kurino Station (Hisatsu Line). Best: Spring cherry blossom, early-summer fireflies, and early September, when bamboo lanterns float on the pond.
Beside Mizumoto Shrine, dedicated to the water god, some 6,000 tonnes a day well out from under a steep cliff of shirasu, the volcanic ash plateau typical of Kagoshima. The spring has served the district's homes and rice fields for generations, and Minamikyushu City now manages it as a source for the mains supply.
Getting there: 10 min by car from the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots. Our Kagoshima guide
A steep, slippery stone path drops about 100 m from Kakinohana village to a wooded rock face, where water pours through two spouts, the men's river on the right and the women's river on the left, into a shallow pool where horses were once watered and washed. Partway down are the stones where women carrying water back up the slope stopped to rest.
Getting there: 50 min by car from Naha Airport.
Start at JR Kokubunji Station and walk 15 min from the south exit to the Otaka-no-michi path and Masugata pond, where springs seep out of the foot of the cliff line into a stream beside the lane. Back at the station, take the Chuo Line to Tachikawa and the Ome Line out to Mitake, changing at Ome. The riverside path along the Tama River starts a 5 min walk below Mitake Station, and the Sawanoi sake brewery is 30 min downstream along it. All by JR, and an unhurried full day.
In the morning, fill a bottle alongside the locals at Gokogu shrine, a 4 min walk from Kintetsu Momoyama-Goryomae Station, and walk the Fushimi sake district. After lunch, go back to Kyoto Station, take a JR Kyoto Line local to Shimamoto and walk 18 min to Minase Shrine, where the Rikyu no Mizu tap runs until 17:00. Half a day each, all by train.
名水百選 means simply "a hundred selected famous waters." The Environment Agency, which then ran Japan's environmental policy (it became the Ministry of the Environment in 2001), chose the list in March 1985 to rediscover the clear waters found all over the country and make them widely known, to get people thinking about keeping water clean, and to protect good water environments, all in support of its water-quality policy. Two conditions were compulsory: the water had to be well conserved, and local people had to be actively looking after it. After that the panel weighed size, history and legend, and rarity or fame. Lakes were not considered. Prefectures put forward 784 candidates, and every prefecture ended up with at least one entry. By the ministry's own classification the result is 76 springs, 16 rivers, five groundwater wells and one irrigation channel, plus two sites that mix a spring or a waterfall with a river.
It is not a drinking guide. The ministry states that selection does not guarantee a water is fit to drink and tells visitors to check with the local municipality. Some sources are off-limits, and the Miyamizu wells belong to Nishinomiya's sake brewers. Hadano shows why the list needs checking: in January 1989, less than four years after selection, its best-known spring, Kobo no Shimizu, was found contaminated with tetrachloroethylene, and it took the city until January 2004 to clean up the groundwater and declare its springs revived.
In June 2008 the ministry chose a second set, the Heisei Remarkable Waters (平成の名水百選), from 162 nominations. There is no overlap, so there are 200 official waters in all, and unlike the 1985 list the 2008 one leaves some prefectures out. This page covers the original 1985 list only. For the 30th anniversary, in March 2016, the ministry held an online vote among the waters from both lists whose towns chose to enter: Azumino's wasabi springs came first for both sightseeing and scenery, and the taste category, judged on bottled products, went to Hadano's.
There is no official stamp rally, but there are collector cards. The cards for this list are numbered S001 to S100, in the same order as our entry numbers; the ministry supplies the template, and towns print them and give them away. Its card pages list 33 of the 100, and eight of those are marked as all given out. Where and how you get one is up to each town (Yorii gives one per person at the Yotteco centre outside the south exit of Yorii Station), so ask before you travel.
We found no entry that has dried up or closed for good since 1985, but several have changed. Less water rises now at Katsuraha Shimizu and at Imadegawa Shimizu, and in 2012 old maps showed that Imadegawa had been listed under the name of Deai Shimizu, a different spring 120 m away. Yamatomizu's source in Saitama has been off-limits since 2002 because of rockfall risk, Shasui Falls can no longer be approached at the plunge pool, and Ryusendo cave floods and closes every few years. The July 28, 2026 Kumamoto earthquake cut the water supply in Uto, sending residents to Todoroki spring with containers, and closed the Kikuchi Gorge until August 4; a separate earthquake on August 12 shut the Todoroki gorge in Isahaya, which partly reopened the next day. The 2024 Noto earthquake brought down the cloister and a hall of Sojiji Soin, the temple that uses Kowashudo spring. We check entries against each town's and operator's own announcements.
The list gets around. In Japanorama, season 19 of Jet Lag: The Game, the players race for seven days from Nishi-Oyama, the southernmost JR station, to Wakkanai at the top of Hokkaido. One of the challenges on the shared board, Flip One Of Japan's 100 Remarkable Waters, sends a team to any of the 100 with a water bottle: fill it with the remarkable water, flip it, land it upright, and sit out five minutes after every miss. If you try it yourself, pick a water where filling a bottle is welcome, like Shirakawa spring in Minami-Aso, rather than Nunobiki, where there is nowhere along the gorge to draw it.
A list of 100 springs, rivers, wells and one irrigation channel chosen in March 1985 by Japan's Environment Agency (now the Ministry of the Environment) as well-conserved waters looked after by their communities. In Japanese it is 名水百選. Famous entries include Oshino Hakkai near Mount Fuji, the Azumino wasabi springs, Kakitagawa, the Shimanto River and the underground lakes of Ryusendo cave. Every prefecture has at least one.
Not automatically. The Ministry of the Environment says selection does not guarantee a water is fit to drink and tells you to check with the local municipality, and at most of the 100 there is no official word either way. A handful have an official yes: Shirakawa spring in Minami-Aso, Saijo's Uchinuki wells, the spring by Azumino no Sato, Ryugakubo's drinking-water point, the spout at Sarukura, Gokogu shrine's tap in Fushimi, and Juo-mura in Hikone, which is tested every year but not chlorinated. Toyama Prefecture describes climbers drinking from the Tamadono fountain at Murodo, though it stops short of calling it safe. Eleven, among them Yotei Fukidashi, Katsuraha and Furosui, come with advice to boil the water first. Otaka-no-michi, Isoshimizu and Imadegawa are not for drinking at all, and Okayama City warns that the Omachi spring's raw water carries manganese above the tap-water limit. Where there is official advice, the entry gives it.
The original 名水百選 was chosen in 1985. In June 2008 the Ministry of the Environment added the Heisei Remarkable Waters (平成の名水百選), another 100 with no overlap, giving 200 in total. The 2008 list stresses community-led conservation and access, and some prefectures have no entry on it. This page covers the 1985 list.
Two are inside Tokyo: the Otaka-no-michi springs in Kokubunji, 15 min on foot from JR Kokubunji Station, and the Mitake gorge on the JR Ome Line. For a day trip, Hadano's Kobo no Shimizu is a 5 min walk from Odakyu Hadano Station, Shasui Falls is 35 min on foot from JR Yamakita, and Oshino Hakkai below Mount Fuji and the Kakitagawa springs near Mishima are day trips of their own.
As of September 2026 none has dried up for good, though less water rises at Katsuraha Shimizu and Imadegawa Shimizu than in 1985. Yamatomizu's source in Saitama has been off-limits since 2002 for rockfall risk (the town has a water point where you can collect it), the same risk has closed the path up to Dangyo Shrine on the Oki Islands, though its two falls can still be seen, and the path to Oike's Meisui Falls in Yufu has been cut since a typhoon in August 2024. Iwai spring in Okayama reopened on August 8, 2026, three years after typhoon rains damaged the path to it. In summer 2026 Ryusendo cave was flooded and closed from August 12 to 21, the July 28 Kumamoto earthquake shut the Kikuchi Gorge until August 4, and Isahaya closed the Todoroki gorge after a separate quake on August 12, partly reopening it the next day.
Many of the mountain ones are in bear country. Asian black bears live in the forests of Honshu and brown bears in Hokkaido, while the Environment Ministry has no recent sightings on record for Kyushu or Okinawa. Bears hurt 238 people in Japan between April 2025 and March 2026, 13 of them fatally and two-thirds of them between September and November, and from April to August 2026 they hurt 60 more, six fatally, all six in Tohoku. Hadano and Higashiagatsuma have posted warnings about bears seen near their springs, and the society that looks after Sarukura in Iida cancelled its 2026 public tea because of them. Before walking to a forest spring, check the town's sighting reports and stay away if bears have been seen; the ministry also says not to go alone, to avoid early morning and dusk, to keep a bell or radio sounding, and to leave quietly if you find droppings, tracks or claw marks.