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1,300 Year Old Hotel is a Sad Reminder of What We Have to Lose

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Forty six generations of the same family have run the Hōshi Ryokan hotel and spa in Komatsu, Japan at the site of a natural hot spring since Garyo Hōshi built it.  This hotel has been open and in operation since 717 AD.  Such longevity is a beautiful thing.

But such a long time is a reminder of a sad reality too.

We may not survive another thousand years.

Hōshi’s descendants have carefully run the hotel for almost 1,300 years, beginning about the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire, and while the prophet Mohammad was only recently deceased.

A lot has happened since those days, and no doubt prices have risen.

Who knows what it cost to patronize the place back while the British were burning down all the Sherwood forest and had to begin using coal for heat, or when the Anastasi were driven to extinction by climate change,  or when the invention of the steam engine really delivered us the age of fossil-fired energy,  or when the seeming miracle of oil first gushed from the desert or when scientists first began to notice the inexorable rise of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

We do know what it costs now, but at a time when the first island is already sinking under a rising sea and dust storms and fires threaten more and more of us and ice is beginning to leave the polar caps. US$580 per night for a double room, which includes breakfast and dinner,  in 2009.

As to what it would cost a thousand years into the future?

Well. Let’s just hope and pray that we make it that long as a civilization. Because there is such beauty in longevity and history.

Source: gizmag