What does the island nation of Japan have in common with a totally bitchin’ rager hosted by the likes of Dionysus, Bacchus, and Liber? If you answered anything besides frenzied wine baths, you clearly don’t have enough of a handle on either pantheism or Japan’s booming wine industry.
France may be the wine capital of the world, but Japan’s wine market is growing pretty damn explosively. Wine consumption in Japan increased 30 percent over the past five years, and red wine consumption increased by a whopping 34 percent over the same period. Japan is now the seventh largest consumer of wines worldwide.
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So you best be sure that Japan’s famous hot spring spas are getting in on the wine-related action. The owners of one spa that bills itself as a “hot springs amusement park and spa resort,” Hakone Kowakien Yunessun, certainly don’t want to miss out on their share of the unbridled wine revelry. So this spa, located in the land of maid cafes and hamburger-themed girl groups, has wholeheartedly glommed onto France’s yearly harvest festival celebrating Beaujolais Nouveau and made it their own.
Hold on to your Tamagotchis, people: The Hakone-based spa is getting its Fat Jew on and filling its massive baths to the brim with a combination of red wine and water. And before you ask, yes—people are both bathing in and drinking straight out of that tub. “Bathing in wine is a rejuvenation treatment for the body, and it has been said that the Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra loved to bathe in wine,” reads the spa’s website.
Although the spa appears to offer wine baths year-round, things really get ramped up around the Beaujolais Nouveau season, which is right now. At midnight on the third Thursday of every November, France begins to sell and export bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau, a wine that is only fermented for a few weeks each year and which is meant to be consumed immediately, in the same year it is harvested. Some people think the BJ hoopla is bullshit, but the Japanese are obviously down with it, especially if they can dip their entire bodies into a bathtub full of the Gamay grape-based liquid.
The French have also been known to indulge in wine baths—it’s known as vinotherapy—and the practice is said to cure pretty much everything, from wrinkles to cellulite to blood clots. Oh, and cancer too. The health benefits are attributed to the presence of resveratrol, a natural phenol found in red wine.
But the spas in Japan? They seem to be emphasizing fun over health benefits, at least at Hakone Kowakien Yunessun. What do you expect from a spa that also offers a Green Tea Spa, a Sake Spa, and something called “The God’s Aegean Sea,” which is “composed of three islands with relaxing spa waters” and “a fully illuminated water screen high above on the ceiling.”
Splashing and bathing in wine, while drinking as much as you want out of your own cupped hands? We’ve heard of worse ways to spend a November day.
