In searching for Zen serenity, the Japanese are spending nights in aquariums, fuelling a $30 billion-a-year business that analysts call 'the healing industry'
As dusk drapes this seaside town in darkness, Ikiko and Kuniyo Hirutani prepare themselves for the unknown.
Tonight, they will sleep with the fishes, and both have come prepared - with sleeping bags and pillows.
The sisters are there with 30 other stressed-out women, ages 28-57, seeking inner peace through communion with marine life.
For about $120 each, they join in Enoshima Aquarium's overnight relaxation programme - including a 45-minute session in which the women massage their arms and legs in a room lit mostly by ghostly, biofluorescent jellyfish swaying gracefully to New Age music.
Before midnight, the sisters tuck themselves inside sleeping bags splayed in front of a vast aquarium wall.
They gaze for hours as soothing sea creatures of every size and colour glide through the cool blue.
"I feel totally relaxed," Ikiko, a 30-year-old apparel company manager from Tokyo, says before she nods off.
"It's like I'm floating, like I'm in the tank with them. Reality feels so far away," she says.
The popular night retreats in this resort town just west of Tokyo are part of a modern search for Zen serenity fuelling a $30 billion-a-year business here that analysts call "the healing industry".
It's a little bit California and a whole lot Japan.
Although this country has long had traditional shiatsu massage parlours and herbal remedy stores, it's now adding "hot yoga" sessions in 98-degree rooms, aromatherapy, rent-a-pets and "healing houses" equipped with steam baths and light dimmers.
They add up to a pricey panacea in a society where changes in men and women's roles and in the workplace are piling on stress.
Healing products and services are one of Japan's fastest-growing industries, analysts say.
A recent study by Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting found that the healing business had nearly doubled over the past decade.
Last year, people in Japan spent six times more on healing than they did on flat-screen televisions and about one-fifth as much as they did on automobiles.
"The Japanese have always had the concept of healing, but the difference is that now we are packaging it and selling it as never before," says Hiroya Kubota, head of a Tokyo-based stress management institute. "Why are we spending so much money on healing? Maybe the Japanese have become too wealthy, our lives too easy. We have no hunger. We have very low poverty and unemployment. Maybe all that wealth has made us see our small problems as overly big and complicated," Kubota says.
But many sociologists say they feel it addresses real needs and problems brought on by a 13-year economic downturn. Although Japan is once again prospering, many people are bewildered by the new roles they are being asked to assume.
Company downsizing is undermining the old concepts of lifetime employment and corporate loyalty, promotions and raises are increasingly based on merit rather than seniority, and a new crop of innovative start-up companies is flourishing.
Insecurity about the future is growing in a country that long boasted of being "one middle class" but now appears increasingly divided between a new super-rich class and a relatively poor underclass.
No one has felt the changes more than Japanese women, who have entered the workforce in record numbers in the past decade.
As they gain financial independence, women often choose to remain single and childless into their 30s and 40s, eschewing the traditional path of marriage and homemaking.
"My mother's generation never had to deal with the work pressures that I face," says Eiko Watanabe, a single, 36-year-old data processor who took part in the aquarium's healing night.
Watanabe spends about $150 a month for aromatherapy and other healing services. Some people spend $500 a month or more.
"I get home at 10pm and I never have a chance to meet men," she says.
"When I do, they all have this outdated idea of what a woman should be, and women have gone far beyond that now. It makes me feel very stressed about my future.
"I feel," she says, pointing to a dim tank of soothing fish, "as if I need this."
Spirituality plays little role in individual lives in modern Japan, a historically Buddhist and Shinto society.
But that is beginning to change.
Luxury day spas and high-end massage clinics have grown 11-fold over the past four years into a $1 billion business, according to Yumiko Arimoto, an analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ.
The spas offer treatments such as aromatherapy and Hawaiian Lomi Lomi massages, some costing $300 or more per hour. "Healing has become huge," Arimoto says.
Once more common on dining room tables here, jellyfish have become the Japanese pets du jour.
Enoshima Aquarium marine biologists say their studies prove that observing the slow movements of jellyfish produces a compound in human saliva associated with relaxation.
That fact, publicised by the aquarium, is apparently one reason why sales of home jellyfish kits, ranging in price from $200 to over $4,000, are surging.