Research Notes from the ARCUS Residency in Moriya, Japan
My research into onsen actually started with Polish sanatoriums. I wanted to compare two cultures organised around spring water, healing and tourism.
I came to ARCUS Projects in Moriya, Ibaraki, with this comparison in mind, but also with a desire to collect. I wanted to record the springs, measure their spaces, collect their water and minerals, and bring something of them back as data and material.
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As I started travelling between onsen sites, the comparison gradually became less important. I became more interested in what exactly I was trying to capture.
Most onsen water begins as rain or snow. It travels underground, where geothermal heat warms it and surrounding rocks alter its mineral composition before it returns towards the surface. In Kusatsu, sulphur makes the water milky white. In Arima, iron turns it rust-red.
The water stains walls, leaves deposits and corrodes the infrastructure built to contain it.
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At first, I thought I was collecting water. Working with the samples, however, I realised that it did not behave like tap water. Minerals separated, residue accumulated and surfaces changed.
The more closely I looked at the spring, the less stable it seemed as an object.
Bathing complicated this further.
Anthropologist Scott Clark writes in Japan: A View from the Bath:
“To take a bath in Japan with an understanding of the event is to experience something Japanese — to immerse oneself in culture as well as water.”
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Bathing seemed to surround me. Even in the smallest apartments I stayed in, the bathroom repeated elements I encountered in onsen and sentō: the small stool and basin, washing outside the bath before entering the water.
In the onsen, understanding happened through my own body. I learned partly by watching others and partly through Japanese women showing me what to do — where to leave my belongings, how to wash, and how to pour the spring water over my body before entering.
I came there to observe, but I had to enter the water to understand it.
Around the springs, I encountered other ways of relating to their materiality.
Many onsen origin stories begin with a wounded animal — a deer, crane or heron — discovering thermal water and returning until it heals. At Dōgo Onsen, it was a white heron.
On my way to another onsen, I encountered almost the reverse of this image: a deer with an injured eye watching me from beside the road.
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I also encountered rocks marked with shimenawa, indicating a sacred presence. At Yudono-san, one of the sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan, the object of worship is a massive rust-coloured rock from which hot spring water emerges.
Here, water and rock did not appear simply as a material background to human activity. The distinction between the spring as physical matter, a place and an active presence became less obvious.
At the same time, I was observing another way in which the spring was being reorganised.
Japan received a record 42.7 million international visitors in 2025, with a government target of 60 million annually by 2030. Onsen are increasingly shaped by this pressure. New drilling and pumping follow demand, while private and in-room baths accommodate visitors unfamiliar with communal naked bathing.
In Hakone, tourism saturated the space: overcrowded buses, visitors moving with multiple suitcases, fully booked accommodation and highly modernised onsen.
![]()
Elsewhere, I encountered almost the opposite.
In Arima, I stayed in an almost empty old ryokan. Its onsen was hidden in the basement — extremely hot and filled with steam, with dark rust-coloured water and walls covered in mineral residue.
On the Izu Peninsula, I passed abandoned ryokan, ageing buildings and corroded pipes. Yet hot spring water continued to flow through them.
The buildings were becoming obsolete.
The water was not.
I became interested in this uneven relationship between the spring and the structures built around it. In one place, new infrastructure was being constructed to accommodate growing demand; elsewhere, old infrastructure was slowly being abandoned. In both, the spring continued to alter the spaces made to contain it.
I started looking for ways to record these spaces and their material conditions.
I collected onsen water, minerals and volcanic ash from Sakurajima. I lowered a hydrophone into the springs, recording the water first on its own and then with my body submerged inside it. I used LiDAR to take spatial measurements.
Again and again, something escaped.
Steam interfered with the laser and produced incomplete scans. The onsen water behaved differently from tap water when I used it to produce biomaterials. Minerals separated, residue accumulated and surfaces changed.
The material I was trying to document began interfering with the methods I used to document it.
VIDEO
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At first, I treated this as a technical failure.
After hearing about ma (間), and the way an interval or absence can structure what is perceived, I began to look again at what was missing. The unresolved areas of the scans are not simply empty. They appear where the laser encountered steam.
What the instrument failed to capture became another trace of the spring.
I began returning to other encounters from the research: rocks marked with shimenawa, the rust-coloured rock at Yudono-san, stories of wounded animals returning to thermal water, and the deer watching me from beside the road. They suggested ways of encountering the spring that did not depend on separating it into a passive object and an observer looking at it.
![]()
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I came to ARCUS wanting to compare, collect and capture the onsen. Instead, I became interested in the structures made around the spring, and in the moments when the spring exceeds them.
Tourism attempts to make it accessible, private and predictable. New baths are drilled and pumped, while old ryokan and their infrastructure disappear. My own bottles, recordings and scans were also attempts to contain the spring in another form.
Yet water stains walls, minerals accumulate, steam obscures, pipes corrode and geological processes continue underneath the changing architecture around them.
The spring kept changing what was built, measured or collected around it.
Perhaps what I first understood as a failure to capture the onsen was asking for a different relationship to it.
Not how to represent it completely, but how to work with something that acts back.
![]()
I came to ARCUS Projects in Moriya, Ibaraki, with this comparison in mind, but also with a desire to collect. I wanted to record the springs, measure their spaces, collect their water and minerals, and bring something of them back as data and material.
As I started travelling between onsen sites, the comparison gradually became less important. I became more interested in what exactly I was trying to capture.
Most onsen water begins as rain or snow. It travels underground, where geothermal heat warms it and surrounding rocks alter its mineral composition before it returns towards the surface. In Kusatsu, sulphur makes the water milky white. In Arima, iron turns it rust-red.
The water stains walls, leaves deposits and corrodes the infrastructure built to contain it.
At first, I thought I was collecting water. Working with the samples, however, I realised that it did not behave like tap water. Minerals separated, residue accumulated and surfaces changed.
The more closely I looked at the spring, the less stable it seemed as an object.
Bathing complicated this further.
Anthropologist Scott Clark writes in Japan: A View from the Bath:
“To take a bath in Japan with an understanding of the event is to experience something Japanese — to immerse oneself in culture as well as water.”
Bathing seemed to surround me. Even in the smallest apartments I stayed in, the bathroom repeated elements I encountered in onsen and sentō: the small stool and basin, washing outside the bath before entering the water.
In the onsen, understanding happened through my own body. I learned partly by watching others and partly through Japanese women showing me what to do — where to leave my belongings, how to wash, and how to pour the spring water over my body before entering.
I came there to observe, but I had to enter the water to understand it.
Around the springs, I encountered other ways of relating to their materiality.
Many onsen origin stories begin with a wounded animal — a deer, crane or heron — discovering thermal water and returning until it heals. At Dōgo Onsen, it was a white heron.
On my way to another onsen, I encountered almost the reverse of this image: a deer with an injured eye watching me from beside the road.
I also encountered rocks marked with shimenawa, indicating a sacred presence. At Yudono-san, one of the sacred mountains of Dewa Sanzan, the object of worship is a massive rust-coloured rock from which hot spring water emerges.
Here, water and rock did not appear simply as a material background to human activity. The distinction between the spring as physical matter, a place and an active presence became less obvious.
At the same time, I was observing another way in which the spring was being reorganised.
Japan received a record 42.7 million international visitors in 2025, with a government target of 60 million annually by 2030. Onsen are increasingly shaped by this pressure. New drilling and pumping follow demand, while private and in-room baths accommodate visitors unfamiliar with communal naked bathing.
In Hakone, tourism saturated the space: overcrowded buses, visitors moving with multiple suitcases, fully booked accommodation and highly modernised onsen.
Elsewhere, I encountered almost the opposite.
In Arima, I stayed in an almost empty old ryokan. Its onsen was hidden in the basement — extremely hot and filled with steam, with dark rust-coloured water and walls covered in mineral residue.
On the Izu Peninsula, I passed abandoned ryokan, ageing buildings and corroded pipes. Yet hot spring water continued to flow through them.
The buildings were becoming obsolete.
The water was not.
I became interested in this uneven relationship between the spring and the structures built around it. In one place, new infrastructure was being constructed to accommodate growing demand; elsewhere, old infrastructure was slowly being abandoned. In both, the spring continued to alter the spaces made to contain it.
I started looking for ways to record these spaces and their material conditions.
I collected onsen water, minerals and volcanic ash from Sakurajima. I lowered a hydrophone into the springs, recording the water first on its own and then with my body submerged inside it. I used LiDAR to take spatial measurements.
Again and again, something escaped.
Steam interfered with the laser and produced incomplete scans. The onsen water behaved differently from tap water when I used it to produce biomaterials. Minerals separated, residue accumulated and surfaces changed.
The material I was trying to document began interfering with the methods I used to document it.
VIDEO
At first, I treated this as a technical failure.
After hearing about ma (間), and the way an interval or absence can structure what is perceived, I began to look again at what was missing. The unresolved areas of the scans are not simply empty. They appear where the laser encountered steam.
What the instrument failed to capture became another trace of the spring.
I began returning to other encounters from the research: rocks marked with shimenawa, the rust-coloured rock at Yudono-san, stories of wounded animals returning to thermal water, and the deer watching me from beside the road. They suggested ways of encountering the spring that did not depend on separating it into a passive object and an observer looking at it.
I came to ARCUS wanting to compare, collect and capture the onsen. Instead, I became interested in the structures made around the spring, and in the moments when the spring exceeds them.
Tourism attempts to make it accessible, private and predictable. New baths are drilled and pumped, while old ryokan and their infrastructure disappear. My own bottles, recordings and scans were also attempts to contain the spring in another form.
Yet water stains walls, minerals accumulate, steam obscures, pipes corrode and geological processes continue underneath the changing architecture around them.
The spring kept changing what was built, measured or collected around it.
Perhaps what I first understood as a failure to capture the onsen was asking for a different relationship to it.
Not how to represent it completely, but how to work with something that acts back.
