In Japan, the bath is not for getting clean. You wash first, sitting on a low stool at a tap beside the tub. Then you get in, and do very little.
Most Japanese homes are built around a deep tub, and a daily soak is ordinary. Behind that habit sits something much older.
Tōji: the hot-spring stay湯治
Tōji (湯治) joins two characters: hot water, and to mend. For well over a thousand years, people in Japan have gone to the hot springs to recover. Japan's eighth-century chronicle, the Nihon Shoki, records imperial visits to the spring at Dōgo.
A stay was counted in weeks, not nights. One cycle, hitomawari, lasted seven days, and three cycles were thought the proper course. By the Edo period (1603 to 1868) the practice had reached ordinary people. Farmers went in the quiet months, cooked for themselves and stayed for as long as it took.
It rests on an idea Britain has largely mislaid: that recovery is something you repeat, not something you achieve.
Three forms of the bath
The mineral waters. Japan's hot springs are sorted by what the water carries: salt, carbon dioxide, the softness of alkaline water. Each looks, smells and feels different on the skin. A guide to the onsen waters →
The herbal bath. Yakusō-yu (薬草湯) is as old as the springs: plants steeped in hot water, practised alongside them. It lives on in the seasonal baths still drawn in homes and bathhouses. A guide to herbal baths →
The cooling bath. Japanese summers are hot and humid, and the bath does not stop for them. It changes. Japanese mint, the evening tub, the cool of the air afterwards. A guide to cooling baths →
Bringing it home
You cannot bottle a spring. But Japan has been carrying the bath home for centuries, from mineral deposits gathered at the source to plant baths sold in Edo bathhouses.
We source only in Japan, one maker at a time, and we take these baths as Japan makes them. A bath, a scent, a towel, a cup, and an evening that asks nothing of you.