Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is not a hotel. It’s another dimension. It is Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity – the curvature of space-time – made into a spa: this ryokan was founded before the first mechanical clock was invented. Made of tatami mats and onsen –Japanese hot springs–, this hotel refuses to change. Many ryokans have given up and now accept guests wearing shoes, and have added Western beds to their rooms. Not the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, isolated in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture.
“Tempus fugit” reads on the only clock in its thermal baths. And this is the secret: flow, disappear, let yourself be carried away by the oldest operating hotel in the world, founded in the year 705 – yes, three numbers – on the vertical of the Yukawa River. Hot springs discovered by the eldest son of Fujiwara no Kamatari, the most powerful Japanese aristocratic family of the time, while he wandered through these mountains.
This ryokan is less than three hours by train from Tokyo, on a journey along which the world slowly slips away, until you reach a station without ticket offices, where you are picked up by a transport from the hotel itself that ascends to the leafy elevations of the so-called Japanese Alps. At the entrance of the ryokan, some Japanese sandals with your name written on them are waiting for you. That’s where your shoes and time stay.
Inside, a world of kimonos, Yakuts, steam, towels and a screen of greenery. Thirty-seven rooms that breathe bamboo, to accommodate between two and seven people. Six thermal baths, four outdoors and two indoors, with waters rich in sodium, calcium nitrate and chloride, open 24 hours a day, with some hours for women and others for men, and with spectacular views over the forest and the river.
There is a pool that is accessible by reservation, so that tattooed people can enjoy these waters (although less and less, most Japanese hot springs prohibit tattoos due to the social association established between body art and tattoos). Yakuza gangs, the Japanese mafia).
Dinner is also from another dimension. It is served in a reserved room at the agreed time: a kaisei – traditional Japanese multi-course dinner – wrapped in art: a personalized menu printed on embossed paper. Each plate or container has a different shape and texture, and they serve smoked fish and koshu meat, typical of the Yamanashi landscapes, which you can prepare yourself on a volcanic stone from nearby Mount Fuji. Everything adapted to the season of the year and the fruits of the forests and the river that surround the ryokan.
The owner and president, Kenjiro Kawano, explains to Magazine how he started working at the hotel at the age of 25 and how one day he was called by his predecessor, whose family had owned the ryokan since its beginnings lost in the centuries. You heard right: 52 consecutive generations running this establishment. But his predecessor had no descendants to continue the business and she entrusted this continuity to him. Kenjiro, faced with so much vertigo, took six months to accept the proposal.
Once accepted, the last president – ??a thousand years of experience gives you quite a bit of perspective – asked him “not to be distracted,” explains Kenjiro. “When you start to be successful, you become distracted by other endeavors and become vulnerable to failure,” he says in his unpretentious office. He is the 53rd generation, and the goal, he insists, is to hand over to the 54th generation the rayokan “as it was given to me.”
What makes this hotel so special is not only the hot springs, which flow from a Japanese geological depth called Fossa Magna. Nor do they write your name in careful calligraphy on the door of the room. Nor does Ryota – the bellboy – make you feel at home. Nor does Emperor Naruhito sleep in these rooms. Not even that the noodles are made with acorns collected in these same forests. Nor that while you are eating someone takes the sleeping futon out of your closet and carefully places it on the tatami floor. It’s not even the price: about 200 euros per day per person with everything included (room, hot springs day and night with their yakutas and towels, the spectacular dinner and the no less surprising breakfast).
What makes this ryokan so special is, in essence, the awareness that its staff has of the thirteen hundred and eighteen years of existence.
