Japanese Spa. Akihiko Seki

      The Japanese Ryokan: A Timeless Retreat

      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