Off to the Onsen

On Sunday we departed from Tokyo via a train out of the city, and switched to a bus that took us to Kusatsu.  Kusatsu is a tiny mountain town with an economy centered around one of Japan's most popular Onsens.  An Onsen is a Japanese hot spring--often heavily plumbed and routed, the Onsen water will be diverted to various foot baths and public baths in the area, plus generally diverted to traditional inns as well, which would otherwise be called Ryokans, but are also called Onsens, if they provide their own bathing facilities using the Onsen waters.

Kusatsu is a lovely little village of about 6,500 people, with a lot of steep and narrow winding streets and beautiful little haphazard buildings that have been built up to support the tourist industry there.

We were staying in a traditional Onsen that my companions had utilized before, and they had told me that I should spring for the food that came included in the booking, if you selected it.  The room itself wasn't too expensive, and the food basically doubled the price--but my traveling companions definitely know what they are on about, so I had booked it as instructed without a second thought.

As you'll see over the coming posts, that was absolutely the right call.

When we arrived I found that the rooms were spacious and delightful; They were rambling little spaces full of Japanese design elements I've grown quite fond of.  I'll try to talk about some of those design elements in a later post, but here's a brief picture tour of my little suite.

Facing inward from the door to my room.

There's a little foyer, around the corner to the left is the toilet area, through the door on the right is the tiny bathroom and shower/tub room.  The tub is tiny but the odds that you'll be bothering with it at an Onsen are super-low, so who cares?

Adorably, the bathroom is set down a step, like the foyer area (where you took off your shoes because you're not some dirty vagrant) and so includes its own special toilet-room-slippers.

Yes, really.

A 360 panaroma of my room.  I took this on the last morning, while the room was configured for sleeping.  During the day the room was actually reset so that the beds were put away and there was just the nice low table in the middle of the room.  During dinner an attendant would come up to your room each night and reconfigure it for sleeping, which was a really lovely little touch that made you feel very well attended to.

Traditional Japanese Onsens are mostly public affairs (segregated by gender), and are also not clothing-optional.  They are nudity-mandatory, so private Onsen are also available for booking for more modest individuals.

In my case, years in the Army leave me worried very little about being naked in front of other dudes, but bumbling your way through a new experience while in the company of other people and figuring out things like "how hot is this water?  Is there a way to change the temperature?  Oh lord I'm dying am I going to catch fire?" and so on are best done on your own, so when my traveling companions were booking their private baths, I had them book one for myself as well so that I could figure all that stuff out in private.

After dropping off my bags, I got changed into my yukata, and it was off to the Onsen!

What's a yukata you ask?

So, one of the things that I didn't know would happen when we arrived was: we'd be told to pick out a yukata.  Turns out that hanging out in an Onsen is not a thing you do in street clothes, so you'll be picking out a lovely sort of minimalist kimono each afternoon.  Much simpler than what you assume when you hear kimono, but pretty and practical.  Unless you're going out to wander around the town during the day (which you will do, because they need to clean so from 10:00 to 14:30 you're going to go find a way to entertain yourself please and thank you), you'll stay in your yukata pretty much the whole time.

There's an extra robe that you can throw over the yukata if you're the type that wants to be warm, and a jacket with pockets and deep sleeves with a notch in them that can work for storing your room keys and phone.

 

So, uh, yeah.  I got all dressed up.

And then it was off to the private Onsen.

The undressing room:

In between the undressing room and the Onsen tub is the bathing room, because getting in your hot springs bath tub before cleaning yourself would be disgusting and no-one but some filthy monster foreigner would do that.

So you come into a little sort of godliness-airlock, and wash your bits.

And then you go outside into the nature (almost all such traditional Onsen are outside, and delightfully Kusatsu was covered in Snow at the time we were there), and submerge yourself in the water that has recently had an intimate tour of an ACTIVE VOLCANO AND HOLY CRAP HOW CAN IT BE THIS HOT.

See that stick with the square at the bottom of it in the front of the picture?

You're going to use that to aerate the water, forcing cold air to mix with the hot onsen water so that it's a survivable temperature for your weakling self.

At which point it's kindof great.  Here's totally scandalous proof that I did the thing.

And really, once you're in, it's amazing.  You feel incredibly clean, and relaxed, and then you just spend the time you're relaxing slowly getting hotter and eyeing the feed source that keeps trickling incredibly hot water into the tub you're in, and slowly raising the temperature until you have to reach for the stick.

Pictured above: my friend/nemesis the Onsen water source.

All in all, I'd say it was an excellent experience.  10/10, would stew in volcano water again.