The Society

I grew up in a modest kominka, a traditional Japanese wooden house in Gunsan, South Korea. What stays with me is not the architecture as a subject, but as a sensation: the sound of rainwater channeling down the roof tiles, the earthen entrance that seamlessly transitions into the quiet warmth of the living space, the subtle give of the floorboards beneath my feet, and how the morning light always filtered through the upper glass of the sliding doors long before it reached the floor. I knew the feel of that world long before I ever had words for it.

The water came later, and it came as medicine. I had eczema no doctor could settle. The onsen did what the prescriptions could not. What began as relief became a habit, then a practice, then a quarter century of returning. By 1999, my parents and I were organizing gatherings in Barstow, California to make the drive together with friends to the Tecopa Hot Springs in the California desert, for the reason anyone gathers around hot water. It heals people, and it is better shared.

I have spent my career in travel and technology in Silicon Valley, and have been fortunate to travel to more than thirty countries. A major part of that path was helping build a luxury travel marketplace, launching markets across seven continents and working alongside tourism boards from New Zealand to South Africa. Work I led there was covered by The New York Times, CNN, and Condé Nast Traveler. One of those journeys was in Japan — Spirits of Japan, built with Jiro Ono and Japan's great distilleries. It taught me what a Japanese partner expects of one. Preparation, deference, and the patience to be told no.

I first visited Japan as a U.S. serviceman, and returned many times as a professional, developing partnerships and marketing for travel and technology companies whose work kept sending me back. That is how a place comes to be understood — and how easily it is overlooked along the way.

Which is why this Society exists. When I finally went looking for a verified record of the water, the pH, the source, the people who keep it, I could not find one. Not in English. Often not in Japanese either. This initiative is my commitment to closing that gap: a focused effort to document the culture, preserve the heritage, and translate the physical science of traditional hot springs for the world.

What I did not expect was to find the house again. The same craftsmanship. The inns are built the way mine was. Walk into an old ryokan in a mountain valley and it is all there — the aged wood, the floorboards, the light coming in through the upper panes. The wood gave me refuge; the water gave me renewal. A ryokan is not a hotel built near a spring. It is the house of timber and stone that keeps the spring in use. A family monitors the heat, tends the baths morning and night, and cooks what the earth yields that day. Some houses have held this watch for four centuries. To step inside is to enter an unwritten lineage—a quiet way with the water preserved in wood, waiting to be discovered.

Toji (湯治) is where we begin, but the purpose goes deeper. Beyond the shelter of the ryokan, the onsen gives us the elemental rest: water, thermal heat, the mineral-rich earth it rises through. Five elements, yet most of us spend our lives insulated from them. To sit in earth-heated water under an open sky is to remember something simple and forgotten: you are an animal and that this helps, and I think people are hungry for it without having a name for it.

So we write it down — the water, the ritual, and the families who have kept both longer than any of us have been alive, while there is still someone to ask.

Go and stay a night in one of these houses. It explains itself better than I can.

Sincerely,

— Steve H. Yu
Founder and Executive Director