Dark wood, warm light, staircases that appear around a bend in a corridor, rooms that follow one another without always warning you. The main building of Dōgo Onsen feels less like a single place than a chain of spaces, built up over time.
A bath that became a set
In Matsuyama, on the island of Shikoku, Dōgo Onsen is among the oldest baths in Japan. Yet you don’t come only to bathe. The main building, with its floors and its lights, immediately evokes the world of Hayao Miyazaki. The parallel with Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away comes up often, especially in the evening, when the façade lights up and figures in yukata pass one another in the surrounding streets.
The district is in the image of the bath: lively, compact, easy to wander. Covered shopping streets, restaurants one after another, cafés, shops, visitors in yukata moving from one establishment to the next. You can climb to the Isaniwa-jinja shrine for a bit of height, come back down to eat, then head for Matsuyama Castle. Everything connects effortlessly. Dōgo Onsen is a place that never really stops. Until the moment it does.
A bath with no one in it changes how you read the place
During COVID, the Honkan closed. As everywhere, the place emptied out. We all have in mind those images of silent cities, deserted streets, familiar places suddenly frozen. Here, the effect is even stronger. When I step inside alone, everything is in place, but nothing works as usual. An onsen rests on a chain of simple, shared gestures. You enter, you wash, you immerse, you come out. Without that presence, the place loses its logic.
Very quickly, a strange feeling sets in. That of being slightly out of step, almost as if you’d been added here for no reason. The bath is ready to welcome people, but there’s no one. And you find yourself moving through a space that, in normal times, you don’t really observe. The silence makes everything more visible. The sound of the water, the light on the tiles, the blue-toned murals, the bird motifs. Simple details, but ones that take on an unusual place.
The heart of the bath
In the main bath, called Tama no Yu, everything organises itself around a block of stone set in the centre. It’s from here that the thermal water springs, straight from the source, before spreading through the basin. When the bath is full, this element goes almost unnoticed. It’s there, but folded into the movement. In an empty bath, it becomes obvious. You make out the engraved characters, the stone polished by time, the carving through which the water flows continuously. It isn’t a decorative element, but the starting point of the bath, the one around which everything is organised. Without visitors, that organisation appears clearly. You better understand how the space is conceived, how it’s used, and above all how much it’s made to be shared.
Photographing the forbidden
In a Japanese bath, taking out a camera simply isn’t done. In this particular context, I was able to take a few images. It remains an exception, and some spaces stay off-limits, notably the imperial baths. Looking at the photos afterwards, what strikes you isn’t so much what they show as what they don’t show. Something essential is missing. The gestures, the presences, the discreet comings and goings that usually give the place all its meaning. You almost feel you’ve captured a set on standby, a space ready to function, but suspended. Like those images of empty cities we all came to know, except that here the scale is more intimate, and the dislocation even more perceptible.
A place that works perfectly well without you
Despite everything, nothing seems to have stopped. The water keeps circulating, the basins stay full, the light shifts through the day. Without the bustle, each element takes up more space. The stone, the reflections, the walls. The place becomes more legible, almost too much so. You discover another side of Dōgo Onsen, calmer.
Back to the surface
Finding yourself alone in a bath designed to be collective gives an impression hard to find anywhere else. You no longer experience the place the same way, and you no longer look at it the same way either. It’s a singular, accidental experience, owed more to a context than to a visit. And deep down, maybe that’s the real dislocation: telling yourself that a place this busy, this alive, can, for a moment, function with no one in it… and that this is precisely where you feel least in your place.
