Japanese Baths: The Great Equaliser?

BY EMILY PAINE

Tom is none too sure about getting his kit off in public. I, on the other hand, am as eager as can be. Lured by tourist posters and guarantees of deep relaxation, I’m determined to try out a Japanese onsen bath in a traditional inn, a ryokan. My travelling companion Tom is blonde-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot tall and, of course, like anybody on a first time visit to Japan, culturally clueless. He’s convinced his birthday suit and bath etiquette will make him feel even more like a sore thumb than he already does, but eventually, grudgingly, agrees to give it a try.

While the popularity of more utilitarian urban bath houses, sento, is declining, onsens, baths attached to a natural hot spring and usually situated in scenic surroundings, provide a vital part of Japanese relaxation and holiday culture. Keen to avoid tourist hot-spots, we decide to head west from Tokyo to Yuumura (literally “bath village”), much to the hilarity of the few who have heard of it. What little reputation Yuumura has, it turns out, is that of a provincial retiree’s holiday camp. I can’t wait.

At the ryokan, we’re greeted with a torrent of bowing and good wishes for our stay as we remove our shoes. For the next twenty or so hours, we’re plied with food and drink at almost hourly intervals, the Japanese reputation for hospitality surpassing itself. To begin, we’re presented with green tea (the kind that looks like an unappetising pea green broth but tastes oddly, bitterly delicious), and tiny sweets on lacquer plates, and given a smiling, laboriously detailed speech about the facilities in the ryokan by a demure, kimono-d lady. They’re extensive, including three baths, one of which can be used privately when you book an hour’s slot, karaoke rooms, a late-night drinks lounge, a breakfast room and garden.

She then trips alongside us to our room, her tiny stature and polite, precise body movements making us feel even more galumphing and slovenly than we already do. The bedroom, which, of course, doesn’t have any beds in it, is laid out with more tea on a low table, which our hostess kneels and pours for us. The window looks over the surrounding country, where hills as smoothly covered in green trees as perfectly iced cakes are sprinkled with graves, and topped with an understated temple.

We try out the baths on the roof first thing. Putting on the yukata everyone wears around the ryokan proves to be the first difficulty. Like a dressing gown, one side folds over another – unfortunately, one of the ways is reserved for dressing the dead in their coffins, but we have no idea which. We head up, trying to surreptitiously check out other people’s garments to see if we’ve got ours the wrong way round. We have, of course.

Taking a deep breath, Tom inches determinedly into the men’s changing room like a doomed man to the gallows. The ladies’ changing room is warm, brightly lit and sparklingly clean, with straw bamboo flooring and a row of generous dressing tables, complete with hair dryers and chic white bottles of beauty products. As I load my clothes into one of the rectangular wicker baskets provided, I experience half a second of panic about actually going starkers in public. Then the smiling octogenarian next to me smartly takes all her clothes off and hobbles, hunch-backed, bow-legged and totally unconcerned, towards the steaming bathroom entrance and the crisis is averted. Wandering from the row of wooden lockers across the changing room doesn’t even feel particularly liberating – it just feels normal.

The women’s onsen is about the size of a spacious sitting room and filled with steam. It’s all made of wood, with slate flooring, and there are several tubs indoors set opposite a row of shower, faucet and mirror units. A sliding door at the end of the room opens onto the rotenburo (outdoor bath). I grab a stool and bucket and plonk myself down in front of a shower unit, and set to soaping and scrubbing every inch of myself.

Eventually, squeaky clean, I step into the first bath, a bubbling vat of green water. It’s scented, the sign explains, with marjoram and rosemary, and smells simultaneously medicinal and delicious. A thermometer shows it’s 40 degrees Centigrade, and after lolling in it for two minutes, I feel comfortably woozy. Next to me, women steel themselves as they crouch with gritted teeth into an innocuous-looking tub – looking closer, I realize it’s a notorious ‘denki-buro’, a bath with electric pulses running through it said to relax the muscles (and defy all laws of physics). I gingerly stick a foot in, and immediately feel as if all the joints in my body have been replaced by funny bones, a positively horrible sensation. Retracting the foot hurriedly, I decide to head out to the rotenburo instead.

The rotenburo is fashioned with large stones on the outside, with a small wooden roof directly over it. It’s surrounded, as the posters promised, with Japanese foliage, the maple leaves now tinged with autumnal orange and red. A coach load of colleagues on a company trip from Tokyo have just turned up, and chat meditatively amongst themselves in the water. I seat myself with my back against the side and look out over the hills, as a soft rain begins to fall. Far from anything Tom feared, it’s the most inconspicuous I’ve felt all trip. A single crow lands on an electricity pylon below and caws morosely. I close my eyes in bliss and try to imagine a similar company-organised trip in the West, sitting with a boss in companiable silence, going pruney in scalding bath water. It’s impossible.

“I’ve never spent so much time drying between my toes,” Tom, now a total onsen convert, states with blissful satisfaction when I meet him outside. “I never knew how therapeutic it was.” There’s an ‘after-bath’ bar serving ice-cold drinks, the ideal accompaniment to the relaxed, freshly-boiled after-bath feeling. It isn’t an exaggeration to say the bath has made me feel re-born – a pretty extreme sensation, granted, but a good feeling nonetheless.

Energised and squeaky clean, we decide to take a stroll around the village before supper. Tom is dubious about going out in our yukata, despite what the guidebooks claim. “They’re your pyjamas. You can’t be meant to. People will think we’ve escaped from a lunatic asylum.” Nevertheless, determined to do the right thing, out we step in our dressing-gown garments, with unforgiving wooden geta sandals on our feet. We’re about two and a half minutes down the road before Tom announces that he has blisters. Blisters notwithstanding, we meander along the river through the village to the source of the hotspring, a boiling, malevolently bad-egg smelling well in front of which sits a chubbily smiling Buddha in a shrine surrounded by five-yen coins.

As the day fades, red paper lanterns light up all along the river, casting their twinkling reflections on the water. People remove their geta and sit dangling their feet in the warm water flowing out from the spring, and the fact that many of them are, thankfully, wearing their yukata gives the whole village the aura of a giant slumber party. We buy three eggs from the shop by the hot spring, encased in a net, and hang it from a hook in the side of the well. Other hooks hold nets containing sweet corn and sweet potatoes and seven minutes later, we wrap up our hard-boiled eggs to eat for lunch tomorrow.

On our return to our room, we find that a total feast has been laid out on our little table. Resplendent in the centre sits a wooden boat holding a mound of sashimi and a whole lobster, around which are countless plates of exquisitely presented food – noodles, tempura, soup, tofu, and brightly coloured, bite-size chunks of who knows what. As we sit down, feeling like imposters to somebody else’s meal, an energetic elderly lady who introduces herself as Kimura-san bustles in, her face creased in smiles, her voice singing out quick-fire instructions as to how we should eat everything. Every bite is a sensation, unexpected and delicious. The courses keep coming, finally ending with a green tea blancmange, a typically Japanese (and unexpectedly more-ish) cross-cultural concoction.

We’re ushered out of the room as soon as we’re finished for our booked hour in the private outdoor bath, but not before Kimura-san has placed a bamboo lunch box on the table, explaining it contains snacks should we get hungry in the night. Unless we run a marathon between now and bedtime, a painful prospect considering how full we are, it seems unlikely. The private bath, also on the roof, is in an enormous wooden beer barrel big enough for several people to stretch out in comfortably. The bamboo taps issue a steady trickle of boiling water, and I watch now occasional clouds drift nonchalantly over a sky bedecked with stars.

Who knew that sitting still in boiling water and eating copious amounts could be quite so exhausting? We sleep like logs on the thick, comfortable futon laid out for us, and wake the next day only when Kimura-san phones through to shout gaily down the line that our breakfast is ready. Breakfast is no less lavish than supper, with a fish one is expected to eat whole and a prawn salad with sesame dressing thrown in for good measure. It would be delicious at any other time of day, but at only five minutes out of bed, still bleary-eyed and trying to adjust to sitting in a hall with thirty other diners effectively in their dressing gowns, it isn’t so easy on the stomach, and Tom looks a little green for the first time since the trip began.

We manage to fit in one more bath before check-out, so we’re riding on a happy, energetic buzz by the time we’re hailed out by a flurry of bowing and thanks. Even getting the fare wrong on the flummoxing local train ticketing system, and being peered at suspiciously by a couple of other passengers, can’t dampen our mood. “It just doesn’t bother me that much anymore,” Tom explains airily, “when I think how similar we all are when we’re naked.” Public baths as the Great Equaliser. Who knew.

If you’d be interested in learning more about Japanese Baths why no try these books out?

: The Japanese Bath
: Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath
: How to Take a Japanese Bath (Zzz)

Jul 23, 2009 | Categories: Escape | Tags: bath house, bath village, baths, blancmange, denki-buro, dressing-gown, geta, hot baths, hot spring, Japan, Japanese baths, karaoke, kimono, onsen, public baths, rotenburo, ryokan, sandals, sento, Tokyo, yukata, Yuumura | Leave A Comment »