Ryokan

With over 180 color photographs and extensive commentary, this book showcases the beauty of Japanese inn, or ryokan. Featured are both old and new-from inns with a history dating back a thousand years to modern inns with the latest facilities that nonetheless capture the spirit of old Japan. Each of the properties has been handpicked by the authors for their strong design aesthetic, commitment to service and purity of their spring waters. The photographs showcase the resorts at their best, and accurately express the unique architectural design of each ryokan. Each chapter begins by introducing the area surrounding the inns and their spas, or onsen, and provides a background of its local history, culture and traditions, as well as the natural environment. The text provides information on the design and development of each ryokan, and descriptions of the owners and their clientele. For those planning a visit to an onsen, this book provides contact details and information on the number of rooms, type of facilities and food, as well as vital information on travel and booking procedures and whether English is spoken. For those fascinated by Japanese culture and design, this book is an absolute delight.

Amid the decline of many of Japan’s rural communities, the hot springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot. Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan have enticed village youth to return home to take over successful family businesses and revive the community. Chris McMorran spent nearly two decades researching ryokan in Kurokawa, including a full year of welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations. He presents the realities of ryokan work—celebrated, messy, ignored, exploitative, and liberating—and introduces the people who keep the inns running by making guests feel at home. McMorran explores how Kurokawa’s ryokan mobilize hospitality to create a rural escape from the globalized dimensions of everyday life in urban Japan. Ryokan do this by fusing a romanticized notion of the countryside with an enduring notion of the hospitable woman embodied by nakai, the hired female staff who welcome guests, serve meals, and clean rooms. These women are the face of the ryokan. But hospitality often hides a harsh reality. McMorran found numerous nakai in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who escaped violent or unhappy marriages by finding employment in ryokan. Yet, despite years of experience, nakai remain socially and economically vulnerable. Through this intimate and inventive ethnography of a year in a ryokan, McMorran highlights the importance of both the generational work of ryokan owners and the daily work of their employees, while emphasizing the gulf between them. With its focus on small, family-owned businesses and a mobile, vulnerable workforce, Ryokan makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Japanese workplace. It also will interest students and scholars in geography, mobility studies, and women’s studies and anyone who has ever stayed at a ryokan and is curious about the work that takes place behind the scenes.

This collection of Zen poetry by 19th century Japanese Buddhist monk and hermit Ryokan is a masterful exploration of life and nature. Ryokan's zen poems are celebration of the joys and sadness of everyday life. His spare, direct style is remarkable for its immediacy and intimacy. This bilingual collection contains more than 150 of his finest poems in Japanese and Chinese, including his famous lyrical correspondence with the nun Teishin, who befriended him in his later years. It also includes a biographical essay on Ryokan, and useful notes on the poems themselves.

Watson includes the representative works of this Tokugawa poet's waka and kanshi works, along with an introduction and the original Japanese poems in romanized form.

The hermit-monk Ryokan, long beloved in Japan both for his poetry and for his character, belongs in the tradition of the great Zen eccentrics of China and Japan. His reclusive life and celebration of nature and the natural life also bring to mind his younger American contemporary, Thoreau. Ryokan's poetry is that of the mature Zen master, its deceptive simplicity revealing an art that surpasses artifice. Although Ryokan was born in eighteenth-century Japan, his extraordinary poems, capturing in a few luminous phrases both the beauty and the pathos of human life, reach far beyond time and place to touch the springs of humanity.

The tourist experience is multi-faceted and dynamic, as tourists engage with its formation and creation. The tourists then become vital in creating value for themselves together with the service provider. Experience value cannot be pre-produced, but is co-created between host and guest(s) in the servicescape. The tourist managers can therefore only plan for and facilitate for value co-creation to take place. This book responds to the need for a critical review of how firms can facilitate and dramatize for enhanced experience value for tourists. As the roles of participants and providers are changing rapidly, new knowledge in terms of how value creation and value co-creation can transpire needs to be generated. The aim of this book is therefore to accentuate the role and importance of the core elements in value creation processes, namely, the customer(s), the setting in which co-creation would take place, and the provider. Bringing together scholars from diverse areas to address the nature of how the actors co-create values through interaction in different experience settings, the book also serves as a guide to the best practice of co-creation of tourist experiences. It will therefore appeal practically as well as theoretically to scholars and students of tourism, marketing, leisure, hospitality, and services management.

Begins with a general description of the features and services of the ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, in which everything from the decor, furniture and meals to the clothing and customs observed maintain traditional Japanese custom, with little or no concession to modern Westernised life. This is followed by a selection of specific ryokan, highlighting their special features.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The Hasegawa Reader is an open access companion to the bilingual catalogue copublished with The Noguchi Museum to accompany an international touring exhibition, Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. The exhibition features the work of two artists who were friends and contemporaries: Isamu Noguchi and Saburo Hasegawa. This volume is intended to give scholars and general readers access to a wealth of archival material and writings by and about Saburo Hasegawa. While Noguchi’s reputation as a preeminent American sculptor of the twentieth century only grows stronger, Saburo Hasegawa is less well known, despite being considered the most literate artist in Japan during his lifetime (1906–1957). Hasegawa is credited with introducing abstraction in Japan in the mid 1930s, and he worked as an artist in diverse media including oil and ink painting, photography, and printmaking. He was also a theorist and widely published essayist, curator, teacher, and multilingual conversationalist. This valuable trove of Hasegawa material includes the entire manuscript for a 1957 Hasegawa memorial volume, with its beautiful essays by philosopher Alan Watts, Oakland Museum Director Paul Mills, and Japan Times art writer Elise Grilli, as well as various unpublished writings by Hasegawa. The ebook edition will also include a dozen essays by Hasegawa from the postwar period, and one prewar essay, professionally translated for this publication to give a sense of Hasegawa’s voice. This resource will be an invaluable tool for scholars and students interested in midcentury East Asian and American art and tracing the emergence of contemporary issues of hybridity, transnationalism, and notions of a “global Asia."