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Japan Takes a Bath.(Tokyo spas)
An odd scene out of Japan's past is rising right by the trendy neighborhood of Odaiba, facing Tokyo Bay. It is a vast spa complex, and inside are meticulous reproductions of the streets, eateries and shops of the Edo period (1603-1867), the final years before the pressures of the outside world began forcing change on Japan. Called the Great Edo Hot Spring Story, it is the longtime dream of its chairman, Isao Nakamura, who bemoans the postwar Americanization of Japanese culture and its impact on Tokyo. "We used to tell foreign visitors that they had to go to Kyoto or Nara to taste and enjoy the good old Japan," says Nakamura. "Now they can come here."
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 ...
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Source: HighBeam Research, Japan Takes a Bath.(Tokyo spas)