July 29, 2003
Tokyo Train Station Public Bath
I don't have any interest in japanese anime, but Bugmaster posted a short item on Japanese Cultural Terminology, which included a section on Public Baths. I found this interesting because during my trip to Tokyo early this month I spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon at one in the basement of the Tokyo Train Station.
I had started off the day with King headache from a big time the previous night. Down one level, to Basement 1, enter the lobby, take off your shoes, and stuff them into free lockers. Take the key from there and proceed to the receptionist, who presents you with a steel box. Into that goes your shoe locker key, watch, wallet, phone, and other valuables. Then in very plain and open view she slides the box back into its cabinet, locks it, and returns you a key that is molded into a heavy rubber watchstrap similar.
Now to the next mission. Enter the locker room and change into a pair of universal sized silver spandex bicycling shorts. Now when I say "universal size", I mean "universal size." I ate a lot in Tokyo, so maybe I was closer to 160lbs than normal, but regardless, I was wearing, snugly, the same size shorts one of my colleagues was also snugly wearing, except he tops 280lbs, probably more.
Once we're all dressed in our spandex, it's into the next chamber. The room is 100 feet deep, and lined with tiny washing stations two feet off the ground. In front of each station is a small stool. The idea is you sit on the stool, in front of a mirror, and wash up with a spray hose, various soaps, combs, and scrubbers. One of the many civilized features of Japanese bathrooms is that the hot water valve actually has a temperature setting, so you dial in exactly what temp you like. I find 47C just nice.
Of course here is where I run into my Daily Yakuza. Every day, at least once I encountered the Yakuza, and my trip to the Public Bath was no exception. In this instance it was guy, probably 60 years old, sitting on a bench covered in the very stereotypical flower tattoos, umistakeably a Yakuza member.
After you wash up, theoretically you hang out in the sauna for a while. When I walked into the large wooden sauna room, the digital readout on the wall read 60C, and fifteen japanese guys were ?happily? watching golf on what must be a very robust TV. I could stand that room for about two minutes, the time it took for me to burn my feet on the shockingly hot wooden floor.
I ran the hell out of there (I am sure we seemed like weenies to the Japanese) and into the Jacuzzi wing. There was the traditional giant, hot whirlpool, bubbling and steaming away. Of course, since this was the public bath, it also had another pool nearby. This one is absolutely still and clear. Why? It's the pool that stays perhaps one degree above freezing. It's an amazingly terrifying feeling to have the water be so cold your entire chest seems to convulse and spasm. My tolerance for that was on the order of two-seconds. I was the only one who cared to plunge into it. The last time we all tried one, my colleague's glasses fell off while he was spasming and I had to plunge back in and fish around the bottom trying to find them. It was the closest thing to being a Navy SEAL I'll ever experience.
After you finish up jacuzzi'ng the next mission is to run a gauntlet of old women (45-75 years old?) who man a series of tables in an open room. They throw you down on the tables, and in pairs, use stiff scouring pads, soapless brushes, to scrape the living hell out of your skin. It's quite invigorating, and the huge deluges of hot water they pour over you is remarkable. My colleagues reported that near the end, the Japanese women presented them with a huge, wet pile of dried skin they had scraped off them. I (fortunately) did not receive this present, but even then, my skin felt as if anything not absolutely anchored to me had been torn off and rinsed away.
So now we're soaking wet, scrubbed raw, standing in our Spandex. They usher us into perhaps the most demeaning gauntlet of all -- changing room number two. Here we're to dry off, and change into some cotton shorts and a robe. In practice, this is also a chance for these 65-year old women to stroll and range around us, ostensibly distributing towels and robes, but also not-very-subtlely checking out our (considerable, of course) endowments. They were about as discrete as a whack in the head. None of us spoke Japanese, but we knew damn well they were all carrying on and laughing at us. I suppose this was somethign of payback for the amount of leering we'd been guilty of for the prior several days of our trip.
The next hour+ is a very strong and thorough massage that practically puts you to sleep. It was scores better than the nasty, oily ayurvedic massage I had in Kerala.
At the end, it's up for a therapeutic tea and perhaps cigarette in the TV room, plopped down on a big Barca Lounger. When you have had your fill of that, you change back into your clothes and exit the basement of the Tokyo Train Station tender, limber, and invigorated.