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THE JAPANESE RYOKAN: A TIMELESS RETREAT

Edo elements remain alive at Tsuru-no-Yu in Akita, an inn popular with hikers, history buffs and bathers.

Slip off your shoes and enter a world that is distinctly Japanese. Cherry blossoms. Zen. Foamy green tea. Warm water meditations one might call, simply, a bath. Hospitality of honor. Ritualized routines to quiet, to sooth the mind, the spirit.

The philosophers, the potters, the tea masters and the poets of Japan, who, thousands of years ago halted the elaborate evolutions of beauty in all its sumptuous gold-leaf manifestations, have attracted generations of humbled aesthetics. Van Gogh, Picasso and Frank Lloyd Wright are among the many painters, architects and creative iconoclasts who have looked to Japan for inspiration. Free spirits have marveled at Japan’s studied serenity and heightened awareness of the beauty of a single blade of grass, a single flower petal, a single wave, a single volcanic mountain. They have studied wood, earth and stones, lines, planes and space and man’s daily interaction with the impermanence of nature.

A Japanese Zen monk once described absolute beauty as “pure white snow in a silver dish.” This crystalline perception of beauty, the distilled, asymmetrical, modest interpretations of Japanese art and architecture that now are emulated around the world are no longer easy to find in Japan. A 21st century traveler to Tokyo must visually edit telephone wires, construction cranes, a wealth of concrete box buildings, concrete mountain faces, neon, plastic and florid representations of nature in ersatz form.

The good news is that even the Japanese have begun to look for spaces that are authentic, organic, human, historic, refined and natural. There are classic inns throughout Japan that have maintained and refreshed their thatched roofs, their bold wood beams, their fragrant tatami floors. And there are innkeepers, who, thankfully, have saved farmhouses, samurai and lordly residences, sometimes moving them and adapting them to accommodate modern-day guests. There are also recently built inns that are prize-winning in design, progressive in their reverence for the use of natural materials, old-world traditional in their concern for showing foreign visitors the unique rituals of a night spent at a Japanese inn.

It long has been lamented that Japan is still backward in opening doors and receiving foreign guests in a way that does not offend host and guest alike. That too is changing. The rigid formality, the inability to communicate in any language other than Japanese and the abstruse dance of shoes and slippers and bowing and bathing costumes are no longer the norm in Japan. At last, self-conscious Japan recognizes that the international community treasures all that is special about Japanese hospitality and culture, yet requires more interpretation to access Japan’s less traveled paths. The Japanese government has launched a multi-million-dollar campaign, Yokoso! Japan, to welcome overseas visitors and encourage Japanese innkeepers and restaurateurs to translate some of Japan’s mysteries for a wider audience.

Tsuru-no-Yu is one of Japan’s most refreshingly authentic retreats.

With an eye for the beauty of shadow, color and texture, bilingual photographer Akihiko Seki has spent two years traveling Japan in order to select and visually capture his favorite Japanese inns and spas. He has tried to visit each inn with the wide-eyed anticipation of a foreigner, who might speak little Japanese and know little of the context of Japanese inn-keeping and hot spring visiting.

Light-years away from a hotel, a motel, a love hotel, or a capsule hotel, a ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn that can be found nearly anywhere in Japan. Ryokan are most often found in settings of historic significance or luxuriant natural beauty. They have clung to history, architecture, art and ways of doing things, and are thus usually preferred by foreign guests as excellent backdrops for studying and experiencing all that is different about Japan.

Peddlers, couriers, pilgrims and loyal lords to the Tokugawa shogunate of the 17th century were among the first travelers in need of a roof and a hearth for the night. Every other year, daimyo (“local lords”) were required to verify their commitment to the shogun by presenting themselves in what was then called Edo, Tokyo. Lodgings along the Tokaido highway linking Kyoto to Tokyo popped up, and soon there was a class system and shogunate regulations for them as well. For court nobles and samurai, there were honjin with formal gardens, decorated rooms, tatami-covered daises for visiting lords and hidden exits for guests in need of quick escapes from their enemy. Waki-honjin and hatagoya were for less-esteemed samurai, servants and other wayfarers of the day.

Time in a Japanese Inn slows to its own relaxed pace.

Check-in involved some bowing and tying up of one’s horses. Guests usually went into the nearest town for dinner and female “companionship.” The Tokugawa shoguns decided that it was time for some regulating of the night and declared that inns must serve dinner. There went the excuse to prowl around town. So, female courtesans began to bring their demure entertainments to the inns.

Breakfast became another inn service, and the tradition of including dinner and breakfast with a night’s lodging has remained a unique element of ryokan hospitality to this day.

Depending on the specific ryokan, its heritage or its culinary emphasis, dinner at a Japanese inn can be a highly formal multi-course meal, kaiseki, whose origins are from the noble courts of Kyoto, or a simpler country feast of tempura, simmering broths, multigrains and wild mountain vegetables. Japanese breakfast is traditionally protein-rich with grilled fish, sweetened eggs, beans, miso soup, pickles and rice. Today’s ryokan are becoming a bit more flexible with timing and presentation of these meals. Many inns now allow guests to specify the time for dinner, and meals can be taken in a separate dining room. A few inns now even allow guests the option of having dinner at a local restaurant.

Sitting like a daimyo before a low table and receiving as many as 10, to 12 or even 15 dishes of culinary and artistic craftsmanship over the course of two to three hours is an opportunity to slow down, to savor each mouthful, to appreciate the design, the art and the architecture of a typical ryokan guest room. Many of the design elements of these rooms were originally taken from temple halls. The rooms usually appear quite spacious, because they are devoid of the expected beds, desk, stuffed chair and reading lights. Rooms are open, ready to welcome people. Light is filtered through sliding screens of translucent paper, shoji, that are closed for total privacy or opened to reveal gardens, perhaps, forests or mountains, water and sky.

Small recessed wall spaces, tokonoma, were also originally developed to serve a temple purpose. These shallow spaces were altars for placing offerings of flowers and incense and for hanging sacred images and venerable scrolls. In today’s guest rooms, tokonoma are for fresh ikebana blossoms, calligraphy or hand-painted silk scrolls and treasured works of art.

Some rooms in Gora Kadan in Hakone have low tatami beds; all feature serene lighting and minimalist design.

Many preferred ryokan are a mix of the Sukiya and Shoin architectural styles popular in the Edo Period (1615–1868). A sukiya is a small wooden tea-ceremony building, whose concept first originated with the tea cottages of the Muromachi Period (1333–1573). Its construction of wood and plaster is simple, in concert with the wonder of nature just beyond the sliding door, which more often that not, comes in the form of an adjacent courtyard garden with rocks and a tree, moss and a stone lantern—a place for meditation.

A shoin is a library or private study once used by priests, and then more grandly conceived by feudal war-lords in the 16th century as a setting for meeting important people of the day. Rooms are quite big with strong, straight-edged pillars. Tatami mats thick with rice straw and covered in woven rush completely cover the floor. There is the decorative tokonoma alcove, fusuma, sliding screens, wood-latticed shoji windows and amado, outer wooden shutters. Behind ornately painted chodaigame doors, bodyguards once lurked in wait to protect their lord from possible intruders.

Happily, today’s ryokan are dwellings of peace, retreats from the tensions of the wider world. As Mr Seki traveled his homeland, he realized that nearly all his most cherished ryokan were onsen ryokan, ryokan near enough to natural springs to be able to offer guests the joys of a spa. The only exceptions to this soothing coincidence are in Kyoto and Nara, historic capitals of Japan that most travelers wish to see at least once, if not many times. Hopefully, the wealth of preserved history and the magnificent garden design that these cities offer—not to mention the remarkable service and environments of the city inns themselves—offset yearnings for an onsen bath.

The numerous active volcanoes in the archipelago of Japan bring with them the agreeable geological phenomenon of over 2,500 sources of healing waters. However, these waters have to pass certain regulations before they can be used as “onsen” waters. As defined by the Japanese Hot Spring Law, onsen waters must flow from underground to the surface at over 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and contain a minimum amount of minerals such as iron or manganese, sodium or sulfur.

The Kayotei Inn in Ishikawa offers highly attentive service and Sukiya-style beauty at its most understated elegance.

The Japanese passion for the bath may date to ancient farmers stepping into bubbling open-air pools to wash away sweat and grime from a day’s labor, or to the Shinto and Buddhist tenets that dignify hot soaks. Ritual cleansing and purification are Shinto practices. A key tenet in Buddhism, bathing “removes seven ills and bestows seven blessings.” It is thought that mineral water bathing may aid rheumatism, arteriosclerosis, gout and skin disease and is, undoubtedly, a cure for exhaustion.

On the assumption that most travelers fly into Tokyo, the first ryokan presented are within a two- to three-hour Shinkansen (“bullet train”) ride of the capital. For those fortunate enough to be able to further explore, ryokan at the end of roads far to the north or far to the south are so very pleasing they often become personal favorites.

According to Zen wisdom, “The journey is the destination.” Along the way, these Japanese spas help us to remember just that.