The promise of a hot dip in Japan’s golden age is an idea whose time has come. There’s even a term, iyashi-sangyo, or “healing business,” that refers to services designed to ease the anxiety of Japan’s seemingly endless recession. They include aromatherapy, massage and work trips in farm country, but none rivals the popularity of hot springs, long venerated for their reputed healing powers. A volcanic archipelago, Japan has 30,000 natural hot springs and 3,000 hot-spring resorts, most located in small country inns.
What Nakamura is building has no precedent for scale or extravagance: a vast bathhouse and theme park with a rural feel in downtown Tokyo. Yet already, there are two other Tokyo hot-spring spa complexes in the works, one almost three times more costly than Nakamura’s $46 million project. Tadanori Matsuda, a professor who studies hot-spring culture at Sapporo International University, says that the sudden appearance of these huge facilities in the urban nerve center of Japan suggests that angst over the economy “has hit the critical point,” and spa builders are capitalizing on it.
It took Nakamura only a few months to attract five major corporate investors to finance his 30,000-square-meter complex, which expects to draw 1.5 million visitors and sales of at least $58 million a year. The backers include Japan’s largest security-service firm, SECOM, and its biggest restaurant chain, Skylark. The Great Edo Hot Spring Story opens March 1, and will be Tokyo’s most spectacular hot-spring fantasyland for at least two months. Close on its heels is the Tokyo Dome Corp., which is spending $140 million on a nine-story hot-spring spa and mall, due to open May 1.
Called LaQua, it expects to make $136 million on 8 million visitors in the first year alone. Bathers will be able to watch baseball games beamed from the stadium across the street to saunas equipped with big-screen TVs. Tokyo Dome Corp. sees the complex as an answer to both the recession and the aging of Japan, which means fewer kids to populate its amusement park, where attendance fell more than 25 percent in the 1990s. It used to be that hot soaks appealed mainly to the elderly, but economic gloom has attracted a new clientele. “Our business target now is working women between 25 and 35, the strongest force pushing the hot-spring craze,” says Tokyo Dome Corp. spokesman Yuichi Sato. Then in June, another Tokyo amusement park, Toshima-en, plans to open a spa complete with outdoor bath in its Japanese garden, plus a bath containing Dead Sea salt and a Finnish-style sauna.
The new Tokyo spas could not be more different from the city’s traditional bathhouses. At a bathhouse, visitors pay about $4 to scrub in regular water, and have to be out by closing time at around midnight. All the new Tokyo spas will tap real hot mineral springs at depths of up to 1,700 meters. They offer more-luxurious services, longer hours (11 a.m. to 9 a.m. the following day) for day rates starting at $20 (¥2,500). If there is a risk in this building boom, it is that Japan already looks saturated with soaking opportunities: the existing spas attract 300 million day-visits each year.
Yet the worse the economy gets, the more popular a nice soak becomes. Already dozens of books and TV programs offer to steer travelers through the hot-spring circuit. In a 2001 survey by JTB, the nation’s largest travel agency, hot springs ranked as the favorite destination of Japanese tourists, and the second favorite (behind theme parks) among those in their 20s and 30s. Miho Fujisaki of JTB, who is 32, says her peers see their fathers losing jobs, fear for their own careers and marriage prospects, and can find “no certainty in the future.” With all that hanging over one’s head, $20 is a cheap price for relaxation. It’s worth remembering, though, that Edo society grew stagnant and ended in turmoil. Enjoy the waters, while you can.
