If you can accept its gimmickry and brazen commercialism, the glitzy, neon-lit hot spring resort of Beppu, a melange of pachinko parlors, love hotels, sleazy bars, night clubs and hot baths visited by over 12 million tourists a year, constitutes an amazing thermal and entertainment roller-coaster.

Willard Price, in "Journey by Junk," his engaging, thoroughly exaggerated account of traveling through the region, wrote that Beppu was "built upon the roof of the infernal regions -- stamp too hard and your foot may go through the thin crust and come out parboiled." The earth does seem unusually brittle here, and with reason.

The city's porous skin is punctured by an infinite number of vents from which steam continuously rises, making it feel at times like a huge, malfunctioning boiler room, all its valves and pipes threatening to burst at once. Scalding water surfaces not only at Beppu's 3,000 or more water sources and over 160 bathhouses, but is also piped into private homes where it is used to heat rooms, fuel brick and stone ovens and warm up greenhouses. The intense geothermal activity contrasts with a leisurely atmosphere and pace typified by the sight of carefree Japanese and foreign tourists strolling around the streets of Beppu in their yukata (light cotton kimono).