Public Bathing and Me

This weekend there was a JET ski trip up in the mountains a couple hours north of here.

I’m famous for not going to these things because I’m a lazy bastard, but I usually have a good time once someone talks me into it. I had a couple friends who were leaning on me pretty heavily to sign up, and in the end I’m glad I did.

Not everyone on the trip went skiing, and there were several different options. One option was to stay in the ski lodge drinking hot cocoa and watching movies. One was to go skiing. And one was taking a tour of the local Onsens (public baths).

I come from a skiing family, and there was a time when I considered myself a decent skier. But I haven’t done any real serious skiing since high school. I went skiing once in Japan, and the ski place was small, over-crowded, and ridiculously expensive.

Of course that was down in the Oita days (South part of Japan). Up here the skiing is probably pretty good (and apparently is, according to reports of other JETs). But then the laziness sets in again. I don’t want to deal with trying to get together a bunch of ski gear and snow pants, asking if they have rentals my size (in Japan it’s never a guarantee), and then skiing on crappy rental equipment and fighting the crowds and the cold at another Japanese ski resort.

So, I opted for the public bathing course. While most of my friends were spending all day out skiing or snowboarding, it was a bit embarrassing to admit that I spent the whole day in the baths, and people joked about what an old man I had become. But I have no regrets.

Public bathing is a traditional part of Japanese culture, and is a bit of a culture shock to most people when they first arrived here. Some of you may recall getting e-mails about this from me when I first arrived in Japan. By the time I started up this blog, I was already used to it and so haven’t felt the need to write a lot about it.

I first went to a public bath during my first couple weeks in Japan. My supervisor had translated it as a “spa”, so I brought my bathing suit. I was slightly uncomfortable about the idea of being in a changing room with my supervisor. I figured after I saw him naked in the locker room, it couldn’t take him seriously at work ever again. On the car ride there I thought over how I would change as quick as I could, and then hopefully be out the door and into the spa before my supervisor even took his pants off.

But it turns out you go to these things completely in the nude. I was in my bathing suit and headed out the door when my supervisor tells me I have to take off the suit and go in completely naked. As you can imagine, I was really uncomfortable about that. Not only did I feel uncomfortable about sitting naked in a bath next to a middle-aged man, but his seventeen-year-old son was with us as well, and the whole thing just seemed wrong.

But the thing about nakedness is that it’s all in your head. We as humans aren’t naturally ashamed of being naked. We’re just conditioned to feel it’s shameful. Once you get over that mental block, it’s the most natural thing in the world.

By the end of the night, I didn’t feel a bit awkward about it at all. I was perfectly happy to climb into a big tub with a bunch of other naked men.

Since that time I’ve been to public baths many times in Japan. Down in Oita I used to go about once a week with other JETs. It’s really nice in the wintertime especially. It’s just like hot tubing, only naked. And it’s always nice to bath with friends because you can have all sorts of conversations while you’re scrubbing.

Up here I haven’t been quite as much, but I enjoyed the public bath tour this weekend. There was a group of about 10 of us going. We bought a ticket at the tourist information that entitled us to enter 3 different public baths. Only one other guy was there, so it was just the two of us in the men’s bath.

In Kyushu most of the hot spring baths are on the ground floor are outside, which gives an appearance of naturalness (although I’m skeptical about how natural a lot of them are). Up here the tradition seems to be to put the hot spring baths on the top floor of the hotel, so that you can see a great view while you bath, but takes away the illusion of natural hot springs. Allegedly the water is from a natural hot spring source even though it is pumped up through the pipes (but again, I’m skeptical).

Because Japanese don’t like to soak in their own scum, in a Japanese bath you must clean yourself off entirely before getting in the water. The stereotype is that foreigners don’t know bath etiquette, but in my experience we foreigners often spend the most time scrubbing before entering the water. Old Japanese men are liable to just pour a bucket of water over their privates and then climb right in.

Because we were in a tourist area, the bath had all sorts of novelty soaps and washing pads, and we tried out as many things as possible. Me and the other guy recommended different soaps to each other as we tried them out. There was a small rough stone in the shape of a pad. I figured this was supposed to be for scrubbing with, so I used it, and then passed it to my friend. He used it too, although not as vigorously as I did. It scrapped a bit against the skin, but I figured that’s what it was supposed to do. Get rid of all the dead skin cells or something.

But after finishing the bath, I looked in the mirror and saw how scrapped red my back was. “I wish I would have laid off a bit with that scrubbing stone,” I said.
“Yeah, it looked like you were really going at it,” my friend said.

(By the end of the night my skin even started bleeding a little. I asked some Japanese friends, and it turns out that stone is only supposed to be used for taking callouses off of the heel. It’s not supposed to be used for the back.)

In the end we only had the stamina for two baths. No one felt like getting in the third one. We saved our ticket for the next day, and used it to go bathing on the way back.

Link of the Day
I'm reliving my first few years in Japan by reading Chris's and Justin's respective blogs. Chris has pictures from the walk in Ajimu, sights I've often seen when taking similar walks (I'm an avid pedestrian). And here is an entry on rice cake making, complete with movies (again, another experience I had myself in Ajimu). And Justin's entry on his decision to stay another year reminds me of my own reasons for staying so long in Japan.