by Karen Sandness
The letter from the foreign students' advisor at Tokyo's Ochanomizu Women's University was explaining my living arrangments for the coming year. "The apartment is currently occupied by an American student who will be going home shortly after you arrive. It's located forty minutes by subway from the campus, in a quiet, convenient neighborhood, and it consists of a large six-mat room, a kitchen, and a toilet and sink. There is no bathtub or shower, so you will have to go to the sento."
The last sentence brought me up short. I had hoped for an apartment with a shower, but the advisor had just told me that I would be patronizing a traditional public bath, and I had heard horror stories about the Japanese bathing in boiling hot water. I quickly consulted some fellow students who had already studied in Japan. They assured me that I was damned lucky to have prearranged affordable housing, and that the sento would be a great experience. I thought they were just trying to cheer me up.
Two months later, I was staying at the Japan YWCA, waiting for the previous American student to move out of the apartment. To my relief, the YWCA had showers, but the prospect of the sento loomed before me, so one evening, I decided to try the Japanese-style bath in the building. I walked into the room to find a large tile tub with steam seeping out from between the white boards that covered it. I tentatively lifted one of the boards, dipped a hand into the water, and immediately pulled it right out. That water was the stuff of lobsters' nightmares.
I hurried out into the lounge to find a friendly older woman I had spoken with at breakfast. "I have a question about the bath," I blurted out. "If the water's too hot, is it all right to add cold water?"
"Why of course!" she replied. "You don't want to get burned. That's what the faucet is for. But don't put in too much water, because the bath has to stay hot for everyone all evening. By the way, it doesn't hurt as much if you sit absolutely still."
I returned to the bathroom, ran the cold water, and, as custom and good hygiene demanded, washed myself completely before getting into the tub. As the woman in the lounge had said, it was indeed easier to stand the temperature if I sat absolutely still. What I could not have anticipated was how good I felt after coming out of the tub: completely clean and pleasantly sleepy.
I moved into my apartment the following week, having bought the furniture and other contents from the departing American student. These contents included a set of towels, a soap dish, and a plastic pan with a Mickey Mouse decal, so I was ready when my landlady, Mrs. Iwai, came by at 10:00 P.M. to take me to the sento. We headed out into the muggy September night, walking down streets no more than ten feet wide lined with brightly-lit houses and shops. The shops were mostly open but unattended, and as I glanced in, I could see the owners, sitting in the back room in the unmistakable bluish glow of a television set.
The sento was a ramshackle one-story building with a towering cylindrical brick chimney. Next to it was a shed containing a couple of coin-operated washing machines. Before we stepped up into the main building, Mrs. Iwai told me to take off my shoes and put them in one of the small lockers by the entrance. I noticed some really tiny lockers off to one side, and Mrs. Iwai explained that they were for wet umbrellas. She pulled aside the sliding door labeled "women," and we walked in.
Immediately in front of us was a scene reminiscent of the locker room in a gym. The wall to the left was lined with lockers, where women were dressing and undressing. A cooing young mother stood at a table in the middle of the room, fastening the snaps on her baby's clothes. Immediately inside the entrance to the left were two beauty salon hair dryers, complete with stacks of movie magazines on the table between them. Straight ahead were doors and windows offering a view of the actual bathing area. I could see two low tile walls with faucets coming out of either side, showers coming out of either wall, and a large steaming tub in the very back, under a cartoonish painting of Mount Fuji. To the right was a wooden partition, which did not block out the sounds of men's voices on the other side. I was wondering about the purpose of the waist-high door in the partition when a naked little boy opened it and ran through to the other side.
Just inside the entrance to the right was a sort of pulpit that straddled the partition. A sixtyish woman, wearing traditional gray and brown work clothes with a frilly white apron, presided over the pulpit, taking payment from all who entered. She could obviously see both the men's and women's side of the bath house, but her attention was fixed on a small television set mounted on the pulpit in front of her.
"I've brought the new American student," Mrs. Iwai announced.
The attendant turned to look at us, and her eyes widened. The previous American student had been a Japanese-American, while I was tall and blond, so unlike my predecessor, I would not easily blend in with the other customers. "Can she speak Japanese?" the attendant whispered to Mrs. Iwai.
"Well enough," Mrs. Iwai replied. "I haven't had any trouble."
The attendant seemed relieved after I introduced myself according to the proper polite formulas. "I'll show her around," she told Mrs. Iwai. "You don't have to stay."
As the attendant--whose rather unusual name I had not heard clearly--began showing me around, I realized that she was talking to me as if I were a child, speaking very slowly and using a lot of gestures. She even referred to herself as Oba-san ("Auntie") as she explained that I was supposed to undress in the front room, wash and rinse at the faucets in the middle of the inner room, wash my hair at the showers along the wall, and never, never bring soap into the tub or let my hair or towel touch the water. The hours, prices, and rules were posted on the wall, and there was a vending machine selling cold drinks right by the hair dryers.
With that, I was ready for my first sento bath. Having practiced at the YWCA, I could manage the actual procedure, but I was aware that the other customers were staring at me. They didn't seem hostile, just curious. The women in the tub gossiped among themselves and ignored me, except to cast the occasional sideways glance.
After finishing my bath, I got dressed, toweled off my hair, and sat down under one of the dryers. I opened up one of the movie magazines--I had now watched enough Japanese television to be able to recognize some of the faces in the photographs--and was trying to read it, when Oba-san tapped on the hood of the dryer. I looked up to see her offering me a bottle of strawberry-flavored milk.
My nightly trip to the sento became a ritual. I headed out at ten, bathed in the company of silently staring neighbors, and returned to my apartment in time to watch dubbed episodes of Peyton Place on television. As the weather cooled, I found that the steamy bath kept me warm in my unheated apartment until bedtime.
Then, suddenly after about a month of the silent treatment, it became apparent that I had passed some unannounced test or probationary period. My fellow bathers began talking to me, offering to wash my back, asking questions, and making suggestions about where to shop and what to see. I even received invitations to people's houses. The invitations usually came after a conversation in which I revealed that I was living in one of Mrs. Iwai's apartments, sleeping on a futon, and sitting on the floor to eat my meals with chopsticks at a low table. It was as if my neighbors needed assurance that they could invite me over without having to run around town looking for chairs, knives, forks, and Western food. Meanwhile, Oba-san introduced me to some of the other students who lived in the neighborhood.
As I got to know the regulars better, I realized that the sento was one of the nerve centers of the neighborhood. Nothing happened without the changing room and bathtub gossip groups discussing it. Whenever I met Oba-san out on the street during the day, she was always greeting every passerby like an old friend. If I had moved in one week earlier, I could have seen Oba-san's family organizing the neighborhood's annual shrine festival.
Now that I was involved in the life of the neighbhorhood, I began spending more and more time soaking in the tub as the heat seeped toward the center of my body from all sides. One winter evening, I felt the heat meet in the middle, and suddenly I was woozy and nauseated. I struggled to my feet and immediately saw yellow and purple clouds and heard a low droning buzz. Two other bathers caught me as I sank back into the water. I was vaguely aware of being pulled out of the tub, wrapped in a towel, and walked out into the changing room. "She stayed in too long," someone said.
I heard Oba-san sliding a door open. She sat me down on a bench in a small, cold, dark room and told me to stay there.
When my head had stopped fizzing, I looked up and saw that the room was open to the freezing outside air just below the ceiling. Still, I didn't feel at all cold, not until I had sat in the room for several minutes. Eventually I started shivering, and I poked my head out of the room to announce that I was cold.
"Good," Oba-san nodded sharply. "You'll be fine. Just be careful from now on."
When I returned to the United States, the sento was one of the features of Japanese life that I missed the most, and I exchanged New Year's cards with Oba-san every year. On a subsequent summer visit several years later, I stayed in a rooming house about a mile from my old apartment, and although the rooming house had showers, I occasionally patronized the nearest sento. I was too much of a short-term visitor to be accepted as a regular, but it was clear that this place, too, was a neighborhood nerve center, particularly when it came to organizing opposition to the building of apartment buildings which, horror of horrors, had the bathtub and the toilet in the same room.
On impulse, I phoned Oba-san and asked if I could stop by during business hours. When I showed up, Oba-san was at her familiar place in the pulpit by the door, and as she greeted me, she remarked, "My old customers always come back to visit after they move away."
"That's only natural," I told her. "You have the best sento in the world."
She giggled and called out to the other customers. "Did you hear that? She said that I have the best sento in the world!"
"Better than American sento?" one of the customers shot back, and we all laughed.
I visited again on subsequent trips, but then the New Year's cards stopped coming. I also stopped visiting Japan for nine years, because all my financial resources went to establishing my translation business. Finally, in May 2000, I revisited my old neighborhood for a guided tour, courtesy of a fellow translator who happened to live only a few blocks from my former apartment.
In part because of a major fire a few years before, many familiar landmarks were gone, but Mrs. Iwai's aging apartment building was still standing, and after some wandering, we found Oba-san's sento. It was too early in the day for bathing hours, but my companion noted the pile of scrap lumber and old furniture near the back door, a sign that the boiler was still being fired. Yet it looked as if the family was having trouble making a living on the sento business alone, because the old laundry shed had been replaced by a bar with the same name as the sento.
I can understand why the Japanese appreciate their modern houses with private baths, and I would never suggest that they keep their country old-fashioned for the sake of nostalgic visitors. Still, I can't help wondering whether the demise of the sento and the inability of so many other mom-and-pop businesses to survive competition from foreign superstores haven't exacerbated some of the social breakdown Japan experienced after its economy fell into recession in the early 1990s.
