Ryokan

Kurokawa Onsen, a hot springs resort village, stands out against the wider fading of Japan's countryside. Its twenty-four or so traditional inns, known as ryokan, bring in close to a million visitors each year who come to enjoy the scenery, the warm welcome, and the baths. Their success has drawn young people back from the cities to take charge of their families' inns and help revive the village.

Chris McMorran spent almost twenty years studying these inns. For one full year he worked alongside the staff, greeting guests, hauling their bags, scrubbing bathhouses, tidying rooms, and washing dishes, while speaking with coworkers and owners about their jobs, personal ties, worries, and hopes. His account shows the many faces of this labor: at times rewarding, at times messy, often overlooked, sometimes exploitative, and sometimes freeing. He also introduces the people whose efforts keep the inns running and make guests feel at home.

McMorran examines how the ryokan use hospitality to offer a countryside retreat from the globalized pace of everyday urban life in Japan. They achieve this by blending an idealized image of rural life with a long-standing image of the welcoming woman, embodied by the nakai, the women hired to greet guests, serve meals, and clean. Nakai are the public face of the ryokan, yet the warmth they provide masks a harder reality. McMorran met many nakai in their fifties, sixties, and seventies who had found work at the inns after leaving violent or unhappy marriages. Even with decades of experience, these women remain vulnerable both socially and economically.

Based on a year of close fieldwork, the book weighs the generational labor of the owners against the daily labor of the employees and the distance that separates them. Its attention to small family-run businesses and a mobile, precarious workforce speaks to scholarship on Japanese workplaces, and it will appeal to students and scholars of geography, mobility studies, and women's studies. It will also interest anyone who has stayed at a ryokan and wondered about the work happening behind the scenes.