Japan has had a culture of bathing in public baths and natural volcanic hot springs for centuries, and I've really become an aficionado of this great aspect of the country since my arrival in 1991. Everywhere I drive, I've got my "bath kit" in the car with me, so I can stop at any roadside hot springs and get clean. One of the more famous images of Japan is male-female "mixed bathing" (called kon'yoku), although I have some bad news for would be mixed bathers -- it's almost impossible to find these baths anymore. As Japanese society has evolved to become more Western, the idea of men and women bathing together has faded, and in all my journeying I only managed to find one official mixed bath. This doesn't mean that men bathing in a public bath need go without females around them, however. For some odd reason, it's perfectly normal for the cleaning lady in these baths to enter when the men are washing themselves, to tidy the buckets or check the temperature of the water, and no one thinks anything of it here.
Sadly, mixed bathing is a lost art in Japan outside of anime comic-relief stories.
6 comments:
Does my memory decieve me or is the pic from 雪桜？
Yes, was casting around for a pic and Snow Sakura fit the bill. Did I use enough steam? ^_^
Actually in Tohoku (specifically Aomori, Iwate and Akita) I know of several mixed bath onsens. The most famous one is Sukayu on top of Hokkoda-san. Others typically have separate inside baths, then one women-only rotenburo and another mixed rotenburo (Matsukawa, Nyuto and Towada-ko onsens). These are great because the ryokans are not usually crowded (inaka desu) and sharing the bath with your wife is easy. I recently went to Hakone and was dissappointed with the masses of people present.
Nice, sounds good. Maybe it has to do with the fact that Gunma is "sort of" urban, with a population of 2 million, and ostensibly a suburb of Tokyo. When my son and I went to Aomori and Hokkaido we were kind of bummed that all the onsens we visited lacked the cold water bath, which we love here since you can get really hot and then cool down, then repeated as necessary. I guess it's so cold up there most of the time they don't bother with cold baths that much.
I remember being at an Onsen and walking around fairly naked. Only with a small towel covering my junk and feeling a bit strange having an attractive cleaning lady coming into the changing room. Japan rules.
Yes, sometimes the ladies aren't old at all, a place I used to frequent had a young wife working there in her early 30s. If I'd been a pervert I'd have lowered my towel. Amazing how even though Japan can be a pervy place at times, there doesn't seem to be any tradition of "expose yourself to the cleaning lady in the bath." And nice that men can get naked together in Japan without a hint of any homosexual aspect being raised, another nice thing about Japan.
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