Onsen

It took me a while to plan this post because it had to follow the previous post on sentos. Obviously this post is about onsen, but how to go about it?

For years, the onsen has been one of the mysterious and luxurious facets of Japan to Western eyes. It seems like an extravagent escape: flee to Nihon and after a few crazy days in Tokyo, head to the West and lounge in a ryokan in your yukata with Mt. Fuji rising in the horizon outside your bamboo window. Below you the ground is fogged from the steam spilling from the thermal baths called onsen.

I didn't want to do a How To on onsen like I did for sento. There isn't much difference between the two except that onsen are natural, they are usually open air and there are traditional style inns associated with the hot springs in some way. You enter an onsen the same way you do a sento. But the experience is far more spiritual, in my humble opinion.

Hot springs make an appearance in almost all tourist literature in Japan and much of the marketing for hotels concentrate on onsen or ryokan which have onsen. They also appear in TV shows, movies, anime, manga and as literary references. Every romance or comedy has a ubiquitous situation involving hot springs. Entire series (anime) have been devoted to onsen and any situation that can possibly include girls in revealing situations in a spring. Onsen have even made an appearance in podcasting (for information about matchmaking onsen, listen to the excellent Planet Japan radio show, episode 8, here.)

Japanese hot springs, like all other natural springs, are said to be as healthy as they are relaxing. If I said in the previous post there was no better way to end the day than to soak in a bath and have a cold beer afterwards, that would be an understatement at an onsen. My biggest problem is that onsen aren't very available in my area. There are a few, to be sure, but they aren't as nice as the thousands in Kyushu or Shikoku, and the inns are actually modern hotels with indoor onsen. The experience is tempered with modernity and convenience that, incidentally, doesn't quite fit the true onsen experience. But I have been to onsen and ryokan out of the area and can garauntee that spending a couple days at such a place is phenomenally expensive and worth every yen.

You don't get away for the weekend and just take in an onsen. It doesn't work that way. You take a short vacation and you concentrate your holiday on the onsen experience. And it isn't like Disneyland; you don't try different onsen in the area like a theme ride. You can try two over the course of a weekend but each particular rollercoaster ride should be slow, no climbs, and langurous. Soaking in an onsen should be a social lubricant, it should be for self-reflection, it should be for sloughing away the worries of the real world and revealing the simple purity of a spirit taking a rest.

And with that last thought in mind, I give you a gratuitious picture of the onsen in popular media. Enjoy.

Sento

The sento. The Japanese public bath. In a nutshell, this is a communal bath house, open only in the evenings, where people go to soak in a choice of baths. The procedure is this: you enter a building that looks a bit like your high school locker room on the inside, take off your shoes and then pass through drapes with the kanji for "man" or "woman". Once inside, you are in the true locker room where you drop your clothes and put them away. At the other end is a large bathing area. This is where you sit on a very low plastic stool and thoroughly soap up and rinse. You wash yourself before you enter the baths. Once you are sure you have rinsed all of the soap off, you are free to join the others in one of the tubs. There will be several to choose from. One might be icy cold, another might be boiling hot and yet another might be lukewarm tea. There might be an electric bath. In some sento, there is a sauna room. More on that later.

Most foreigners are uncomfortable with the idea of the public bath. On the one hand, if you are staying at a traditional japanese inn, you can't avoid it: there aren't individual showers and you can't bathe in the morning like we usually do. You have to use the communal bath area. Sentos are the idea that you must go down the street to a business catering to bathers and strip, wash (before the bath, not IN the bath) and then soak in the tub with a bunch of strangers. And because you are foreigner, they all want to look at your penis. Its true.

It took me about a year before I was ready to take the plunge, as it were. I was living in a ryokan-turned-gaijin house and most of my housemates went to a sento across the street at least twice a week. They always came back like they just had the full spa treatment. But I am a bit of an uptight guy. The kind of guy who makes sure the bathroom door is locked when he takes a shower. But I came across an article introducing the virtues of the sento. So I decided to give it a try. I was careful to watch others before trying it myself. I even took a quick shower before going on my expedition to be on the safe side. Three hours later, I was a changed man.

You have to understand, once you go sento, you never go back. You go native. The sento is the greatest idea ever and why it hasn't caught on in the States, I'll never understand. Okay, yeah, we have public baths...those kinds of baths...and we have hot springs, but its not the same. Its hard to explain, you just have to do it yourself to get the picture.

Now, when I travel in Japan, its no accident that the first thing I ask about are the sento. I've become kind of a sento snob. But I am not alone, its a treat, and sometimes my only excuse for getting out of bed and putting in a long day at work. And I have a routine. I clop down to the local sento in my flip flops, pay the ridiculously cheap admission fee, get naked and spend at least fifteen minutes lathering, shampooing and shaving. And then rinsing. Then I get into the warm bath. That's key. Its preparation for the "you won't have children after this" volcanic bath next. When my skin has started to blister and I have trouble seeing because my corneas have shriveled, I get out and steam in the tiny wood sauna room. When I am almost recovered but now hallucinating, I get out and step into the icy cold tub, whose waters I think might have been siphoned from Siberia.

Then I rinse in the shower and start the cycle over again. And I do this about three or four times. When I return home, I weigh about fifty pounds, I'm four inches shorter and my skin glows like a fourteen year old girl's. Then I plop down on my tatami floor, flick on the fan and drink a very cold beer. The end of a day couldn't be better.