Finding Friendship in Warm Waters

His new book, “Towards a Nude Architecture,” which launches in the U.S. this month, documents the wildly diverse onsen scattered across Japan—from a remote, birch-wrapped bath deep in the forest to the copper-roofed urban bathhouse rumored to have inspired one in Miyazaki’s 2001 film “Spirited Away.” Featuring a collection of photographs, drawings and collages, the book is part travelogue, part history lesson, and explores how the structures developed around these pools have fostered a cultural communion as old as Japan itself.

An architect and designer, Zohar has spent much of his career in Asia; he credits UMD for nurturing a burgeoning love for cultures that was first piqued as a kid watching movies like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” As a freshman, he joined UMD’s Wushu martial arts club (the glint off a broadsword from across McKeldin Mall at the First Look Fair sealed the deal).

He dabbled in academic subjects from voice development, which he says has helped his karaoke game, to criminology. He had little interest in following in his architect mother’s footsteps—until he took “Introduction to Architecture” to satisfy a gen ed requirement.

“The class helped me understand that architecture is just super creative problem solving at some of the largest scales, and that was so exciting,” he said.

Zohar worked just eight months at a D.C. design firm before massive layoffs during the 2008 financial crisis sent him backpacking across China and Japan, where he first dipped his toe into an onsen. He eventually landed in Shanghai to join China’s rapidly growing architectural scene, but the experience was never far from his mind.

“I just knew I wanted to explore as many as I could,” he said.

Over a decade, Zohar visited over a hundred of hot springs across Japan. In one extreme example, he drove four hours to catch a four-hour ferry to the sparsely inhabited island of Iojima, where he precariously biked through dense thickets to reach Higashi Onsen, a stunning and solitary hot spring that spills into the Pacific. On each trip he’d sketch the structures built specifically to strip social hierarchy and foster fellowship in steaming waters of burnt orange, cobalt blue and milky-white.

It was boredom during COVID—and a nudge from the steaming grates outside his new home in Manhattan—that prompted Zohar to consider compiling all he experienced into a book. He titled it “Towards a Nude Architecture” partly as an homage to famed architect Le Corbusier (and his canon, “Towards a New Architecture”), but also as a descriptor for the understated design of onsen, which facilitates the act of bathing rather than overshadowing it.

The roughly 28,000 mineral-rich hot spring sources across Japan's landscape supply water to around 2,900 onsen, which for centuries have been used to relieve ailments such as depression, insomnia, constipation, eczema, arthritis, anemia and more.

“With ‘Towards a Nude Architecture,’ Yuval Zohar charts the thermal pulse of a culture, and in doing so, reveals how architecture can rescue our most elemental ways of being together,” wrote Thomai Szimpou in a review for Designboom. “[He] takes readers on an immersive, almost topographical journey, where water and steam become guiding metaphors for transformation and collective intimacy.”

The story of onsen, said Zohar, is the story of Japan itself. Known for their medicinal and spiritual properties, the springs were frequented by both Buddhist monks, who used it for ritual cleansing, and samurai, who took their soldiers to secret onsen to heal after battle. They have survived—or have been rebuilt—after natural disasters and devastating wars. Color, viscosity, smell and taste of the waters vary across the roughly 2,900 onsen in Japan, as does the temperature—although it is usually north of 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) at its source. And unlike in the steam room at Eppley, sitting stark naked in onsen is a cultural norm.

“Everybody is equal in their nudity,” he said. “It creates a certain type of social interaction that really doesn't exist in other places. Kids growing up here see bodies of different ages and conditions, and we just don’t do that in the West.”

Today, said Zohar, the traditional onsen are being superseded by baths in private homes and a surge in commercialized “supercento bathhouses”; while easier to access, they lack the intimate neighborhood scale. As a designer, he has worked on dozens of projects that prioritize spaces for gathering, an aspect of humanity needed now more than ever.

“As we live closer together, we see each other less and less, we talk less and less,” he said. “And that's to the detriment of society.”

Zohar doesn’t predict the disappearance of traditional onsen but does see it as a philosophy worth replicating. He closes the book with what could be his next venture: a Western reimagination of onsen in SoHo, with mineral-rich pools heated by Manhattan’s underground steam network. It would be situated, ironically, in a shuttered Victoria’s Secret.