Amid the decline of many of Japan's rural communities, the hot
springs village resort of Kurokawa Onsen is a rare, bright spot.
Its two dozen traditional inns, or ryokan, draw nearly a million
tourists a year eager to admire its landscape, experience its
hospitality, and soak in its hot springs. As a result, these ryokan
have enticed village youth to return home to take over successful
family businesses and revive the community. Chris McMorran spent
nearly two decades researching ryokan in Kurokawa, including a full
year of welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths,
cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and
owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations.
He presents the realities of ryokan work-celebrated, messy,
ignored, exploitative, and liberating-and introduces the people who
keep the inns running by making guests feel at home. McMorran
explores how Kurokawa's ryokan mobilize hospitality to create a
rural escape from the globalized dimensions of everyday life in
urban Japan. Ryokan do this by fusing a romanticized notion of the
countryside with an enduring notion of the hospitable woman
embodied by nakai, the hired female staff who welcome guests, serve
meals, and clean rooms. These women are the face of the ryokan. But
hospitality often hides a harsh reality. McMorran found numerous
nakai in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who escaped violent or unhappy
marriages by finding employment in ryokan. Yet, despite years of
experience, nakai remain socially and economically vulnerable.
Through this intimate and inventive ethnography of a year in a
ryokan, McMorran highlights the importance of both the generational
work of ryokan owners and the daily work of their employees, while
emphasizing the gulf between them. With its focus on small,
family-owned businesses and a mobile, vulnerable workforce, Ryokan
makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the Japanese
workplace. It also will interest students and scholars in
geography, mobility studies, and women's studies and anyone who has
ever stayed at a ryokan and is curious about the work that takes
place behind the scenes.
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