It’s not every architect who braves four hours at sea on a sporadic ferry to a Japanese island with a smoldering sulfurous volcano and then bikes through a jungle to reach the object of his desire: a rocky outcropping of emerald green hot springs that turn striated turquoise when the ocean laps over the edges.
But Yuval Zohar, an Israeli American now living in Japan, is not every architect. Call him the nude dude: His passion for hot springs, or “onsen,” as they are known in Japan, and the public bathhouses known as “sento,” drew him to the island of Iojima, a sparsely populated speck of land in the East China Sea, to the eye-grabbing Higashi Onsen. His obsession unfolds in dramatic detail in his recent book, “Towards a Nude Architecture: A Visual Compendium of Japanese Hot Springs.” The title is a nod to Le Corbusier’s classic 1923 “Toward a New Architecture.”
Japan is one of earth’s most volcanically robust places, with nearly 30,000 naturally occurring hot springs of varying temperatures, hues and mineral compositions, from milky white to bubbling black. They are typically accompanied by what Zohar, 38, calls “temples of steam and sweat” — vernacular architecture that “dignifiedly performs its duty free of frills, as naked as the people it serves,” he said.
Over the past decade, he has lolled about in single-bather barrels (or tara-buro); indoor baths (uchiburo); outdoor baths (rotenburo); male baths (otokoyu); mixed-gender baths (konyoku); foot baths (ashiyu); hand baths (tayu); waterfall baths (utaseyu); cave baths (gankutsuboro); and even sleeping baths (neyu).
Although he is hardly the first writer to wax eloquent about onsen, Zohar’s visual collages and impressionistic essays on notable hot springs include schematic drawings and site plans and wonky notations on the chemical and mineral compositions and temperatures of each one (Higashi Onsen: H20 Sulfuric Acid/pH1.7/47-55.8 °C).
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