Minerals and Landscapes: Hot Springs Guidebooks in 1870s and 80s Japan

This paper explores the changing representations of geothermal hot springs from the Tokugawa (1603-1868) to the Meiji period (1868-1912) by highlighting new images and ideas about bathing that came to define modern Japan’s cultural identity. With the “opening” of Japan in the 1850s and the subsequent overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the Meiji state rapidly incorporated Western knowledge, goods, and people into existing political and institutional systems and transformed Japan in accordance with the modern nation-state model.

In contrast to representations of hot springs during the Tokugawa period, which signaled sites providing both men and women with places to recuperate from travel-related fatigue or receive medicinal treatment (tōji, hot water treatment), hot springs became sites to demonstrate mannered, civilized practice in the late nineteenth century. By removing the images and ideas at the medicinal sites of hot springs where men and women mingled hoping to be cured by the miraculous effectiveness of the water, the Meiji state quickly extended control over hot springs nationwide, subordinating them to the Home Ministry’s quarantine inspection system. Meanwhile, at international conferences on minerals the government advanced Japan as a nation innately blessed with abundant hot springs. The late 1870s and 80s witnessed a robust publication of local hot springs guidebooks that publicized the medical effectiveness and international fame of their local hot springs. My analysis examines how the idea of Japan as a country of natural hot springs, clean air, and distinct landscapes quickly concealed the mixed bathing and other uncivilized behaviors that surrounded popular practice in the Tokugawa period.