Japan for Onsen Lovers & Hot-Spring Travelers

About this book

200 composed journeys across all of steam Japan — bases, sequences, seasons and fallbacks included, ready to travel the night you buy it.

Japan for Onsen Lovers & Hot-Spring Travelers is the first English guide built entirely of onsen journeys: the Hakone caldera ridden as one rising circuit, Kinosaki's seven public baths walked in wooden sandals, Sukayu's thousand-person hall under deep snow, a village built on a frozen lake, the sand baths of Ibusuki, the cure valleys where the stay is measured in months, the pilgrimage roads and castle towns of the old bath highways, and the bather's craft itself — the first bath, the dawn circuit, the last-train day trip, the three-generation journey. Eight parts: gateways and great towns travelled as circuits; mountains, gorges and hidden valleys; the snow country; coast, lakes and islands; the toji cure tradition; the old bath roads; and the craft, keyed by purpose.

Place guides tell you what a town is. This book tells you how to go: where to sleep, in what order to bathe, which season redeems the driving, and what to do on the morning the snow closes the famous road. Bath houses and inns are working businesses in living neighbourhoods, so nothing changeable is asserted and no price is stated — every one of the 200 entries closes with its own official-confirmation sentence, written for that entry alone. No health or healing effect is claimed for any water; the cure tradition is told as custom and history, and the land, the culture and the movement carry the book.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.