I enjoy Japan because it is so richly Other. Central to Japanese "otherness" is the bath. Like the famous tea ceremony, it's larger than it seems. The shortest route into traditional Japanese culture is a soak in a very hot bath, preferable in a communal bathhouse, more preferably in an intimate, well-crafted hot spring located in a mossy thatched inn with paper doors and tatami floors at the end of a trail. Problem is this romantic ideal is very hard to locate, especially for foreigners. But they do exist. This wonderfully small, intimate and well-crafted book will guide to you the few remaining really traditional hot spring (onsen) in Japan. Despite this guidebook, you'll only find Japanese staying there. The author has visited several hundred Japanese onsen (I've been to maybe a dozen) and will save you the incredibly depressing experience of winding up in a hideous concrete over-commercialized urban disaster - which is what most of the springs have become. Any one of the chosen here are little-known national treasures worth going way out of your way to soak in overnight and soak up.

-- KK

Japan's Hidden Hot Springs
Robert Neff
1995, 180 pages
$11 from Amazon