Indulgence

It's noon on a winter day and I'm on the Tokyo Station train platform waiting for the bullet train to the town of Echigo Yuzawa in Niigata Prefecture. In less than two hours I will be up to my ears in hot water-reclining in one of Japan's thousands of thermal baths.

Two-thousand hot springs feed into 10 times that many baths, providing a soothing connection to a lifestyle born long before the rapid industrialization of the last century.

In Japan, bathing is for relaxation and cleansing the soul, not the body. Soap is strictly verboten, and water is always left in the deep tub at home until the last bather has soaked. Washing is done while sitting on a small stool using a hand-held shower head, or from a bucket dipped into the hot springs.

While each hot spring and each season brings with it a unique bathing experience, it's been in the mountains in mid-winter where I've felt transported back to the Japan before Commodore Perry dropped anchor and helped set in motion the "modernization" of Japan.

Echigo Yuzawa is in the area of central Japan known as snow country, which encompasses Gunma Prefecture and extends into parts of neighboring Niigata and Nagano prefectures. The proximity to Tokyo makes snow country easily accessible to international travelers.

I learned of Echigo Yuzawa while reading Kawabata Yasunari's Nobel Prize-winning book, "Yukiguni" (Snow Country), about the relationship between a hot spring geisha and her city-dwelling client, set in the 1930s. "After passing through a long border tunnel, it was snow country," reads the book's opening line. It aptly conveys the experience of passing from darkness into light, as well as the geographic transition from the flat plains and towns outside of Tokyo into these mountains blanketed by white powder in winter.

The hot spring water at Echigo Yuzawa is between 104 and 107 degrees Fahrenheit - hot but not too hot. It's perfect for the popular pastime known as yukimi, or snow gazing-meditating while watching the snow. An inebriated version known as yukimi-zake adds Japan's most popular spirit, sake, to the mix. It seems particularly popular with skiers returning from a day on slopes that end a few feet from main street.

By late afternoon I'm reclining in the hot spring at the Hakuginkaku Hananoyoi Ryokan. The hotel is a hidden oasis of tradition. When guests arrive at a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn), they are supposed to leave their shoes and their worldly worries behind. The hot spring is a soothing counterpoint to the 20-degree December day and seems an appropriate occasion for contemplation, but a sustained "ahh" is the best I can muster. Time and reality bend, and it's not just from the sake provided by a small but festive group of apres-skiers.

After a great night's sleep on a futon, I have a morning bath and breakfast, which includes a raw egg mixed with soy sauce and poured over steamed rice, Japanese pickles, and a piece of fish I check out and bundle up to make my way on foot through snow drifts to the Takahan Hotel, perched on a hill. I've come to pay my respects to Kawabata, the late author of "Yukiguni." His room at the Takahan has been preserved, along with showcases of photographs and personal memorabilia. It was Kawabata's words that brought me to Snow Country, and it is the magic of this place that the legendary author so well described that will keep me coming back.

Continued to Day 2.