Onsen

It took me a while to plan this post because it had to follow the previous post on sentos. Obviously this post is about onsen, but how to go about it?

For years, the onsen has been one of the mysterious and luxurious facets of Japan to Western eyes. It seems like an extravagent escape: flee to Nihon and after a few crazy days in Tokyo, head to the West and lounge in a ryokan in your yukata with Mt. Fuji rising in the horizon outside your bamboo window. Below you the ground is fogged from the steam spilling from the thermal baths called onsen.

I didn't want to do a How To on onsen like I did for sento. There isn't much difference between the two except that onsen are natural, they are usually open air and there are traditional style inns associated with the hot springs in some way. You enter an onsen the same way you do a sento. But the experience is far more spiritual, in my humble opinion.

Hot springs make an appearance in almost all tourist literature in Japan and much of the marketing for hotels concentrate on onsen or ryokan which have onsen. They also appear in TV shows, movies, anime, manga and as literary references. Every romance or comedy has a ubiquitous situation involving hot springs. Entire series (anime) have been devoted to onsen and any situation that can possibly include girls in revealing situations in a spring. Onsen have even made an appearance in podcasting (for information about matchmaking onsen, listen to the excellent Planet Japan radio show, episode 8, here.)

Japanese hot springs, like all other natural springs, are said to be as healthy as they are relaxing. If I said in the previous post there was no better way to end the day than to soak in a bath and have a cold beer afterwards, that would be an understatement at an onsen. My biggest problem is that onsen aren't very available in my area. There are a few, to be sure, but they aren't as nice as the thousands in Kyushu or Shikoku, and the inns are actually modern hotels with indoor onsen. The experience is tempered with modernity and convenience that, incidentally, doesn't quite fit the true onsen experience. But I have been to onsen and ryokan out of the area and can garauntee that spending a couple days at such a place is phenomenally expensive and worth every yen.

You don't get away for the weekend and just take in an onsen. It doesn't work that way. You take a short vacation and you concentrate your holiday on the onsen experience. And it isn't like Disneyland; you don't try different onsen in the area like a theme ride. You can try two over the course of a weekend but each particular rollercoaster ride should be slow, no climbs, and langurous. Soaking in an onsen should be a social lubricant, it should be for self-reflection, it should be for sloughing away the worries of the real world and revealing the simple purity of a spirit taking a rest.

And with that last thought in mind, I give you a gratuitious picture of the onsen in popular media. Enjoy.