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 total 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.
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.
Sekitei, across from Miyajima, is a garden of peace overlooking the Inland Sea; Saryo-Soen in Sendai, a boutique ryokan on six-and-a-half acres in the Akiu Onsen region; Edo elements remain alive at Tsuru-no-Yu in Akita, an inn popular with hikers, history buffs and bathers; Tsuru-no-Yu is one of Japan’s most refreshingly authentic retreats; Built in 1873, Mukaitaki in Aizu-Wakamatsu makes guests feel like their futon are floating among the trees.
Murata, on the east coast of Kyushu at Yufuin Onsen, a "petit" onsen ryokan of century-old farmhouses with open, airy spaces of Western and Eastern comfort.
The Kayotei Inn in Ishikawa offers highly attentive service and Sukiya-style beauty at its most understated elegance.
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 streams of 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. Understandably, lodgings along the Tokaido highway linking Kyoto to Tokyo popped up, and soon there was a class system regulations for them as well. For court nobles and highly regarded 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.
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.
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 warlords 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
