{"id":9,"date":"2003-05-26T15:21:03","date_gmt":"2003-05-26T09:21:03","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2013-01-10T17:03:35","modified_gmt":"2013-01-11T00:03:35","slug":"japans-hidden-h","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/japans-hidden-h\/","title":{"rendered":"Japan&#8217;s Hidden Hot Springs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I enjoy Japan because it is so richly Other. Central to Japanese &#8220;otherness&#8221; is the bath. Like the famous tea ceremony, it&#8217;s larger than it seems. The shortest route into traditional Japanese culture is a soak in a very hot bath, preferable in a communal bathhouse, more preferably in an intimate, well-crafted hot spring located in a mossy thatched inn with  paper doors and tatami floors at the end of a trail. Problem is this romantic ideal is very hard to locate, especially for foreigners. But they do exist. This wonderfully small, intimate and well-crafted book will guide to you the few remaining really traditional hot spring (onsen) in Japan. Despite this guidebook, you&#8217;ll only find Japanese staying there. The author has visited several hundred Japanese onsen (I&#8217;ve been to maybe a dozen) and will save you the incredibly depressing experience of winding up in a hideous concrete over-commercialized urban disaster &#8211; which is what most of the springs have become. Any one of the chosen here are little-known national treasures worth going way out of your way to soak in overnight and soak up.<\/p>\n<div class='ctx-module-container ctx_default_placement ctx-clearfix'><\/div><span class=\"ctx-article-root\"><!-- --><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Essential guidebook to Old Japan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8587,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/8587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}