Ryokan: Mobilising Hospitality in Rural Japan

Guest talk by Chris McMorran, National University of Singapore.

Kurokawa Onsen is a rare bright spot in Japan’s countryside. Its traditional inns (ryokan) annually host hundreds of thousands of guests who 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 family businesses and revive the community. What does it take to run a family business in one of Japan’s most relaxing spaces, and who does the day-to-day labor of hospitality? In this talk, I share findings from a year spent welcoming guests, carrying luggage, scrubbing baths, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and talking with co-workers and owners about their jobs, relationships, concerns, and aspirations. I share how Kurokawa’s ryokan mobilise hospitality to create a rural escape, emphasising the ideological meaning of the built landscape, the gendered work of hospitality, and the generational work of ryokan owners vs. daily embodied work of their employees.

Bio

Chris McMorran is Associate Professor of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is a cultural geographer of contemporary Japan focusing on the geographies of home across scale. He is author of Ryokan: Mobilizing Hospitality in Rural Japan, an ethnography of a traditional inn located in Kurokawa Onsen. He also has published research on tourism, disasters, gendered labor, area studies, field-based learning, and popular culture, including as co-editor of Teaching Japanese Popular Culture. Finally, Chris co-produced (with NUS students) the Home on the Dot podcast, which explores the complex spaces and meanings of home in Singapore. His current research explores the complex meanings of abandonment and revitalisation in Japan's countryside.