The Sento

SENDAI, JAPAN — For a Westerner living in Japan, memorable experiences often occur in the most ordinary of places. One of mine happened on the sidewalk down the street from my apartment, when a young woman asked me, in Japanese, for directions to the local sento (public bath).

It was surprising enough that she would pick me out — a Westerner whom most Japanese assume can only speak the most rudimentary version of their language — that I had to make sure that I had understood her question. "Sento?" I asked.

And when she replied that that was indeed where she wanted to go, I asked again, in more familiar Japanese, "Ofuro?" (a general word for "bath"), because a typical young Japanese woman isn't usually inclined to go to a sento. "Yes," she said. "I heard there was one around here."

The sento happened to be up the street, across from my apartment. She had been heading in the wrong direction. We walked back up the street together, until the sign came into sight, and I pointed it out to her.

Preconceived ideas about people, I admitted to myself, weren't limited to the Japanese.

This young woman, besides picking me out to ask directions, was an oddball in another way, too, but my kind of oddball, because I've been a connoisseur of sentos for many years. Women her age simply don't go to sentos much anymore.

(Sento)

They prefer onsens, which is what most Westerns think of when they picture themselves melting away in a steamy Japanese bath. Onsens are baths — and sometimes hotel resorts — that have mineral waters. The waters are billed as a cure for just about anything from backaches to menstrual cramps to diabetes — if the sufferer pays in advance. Sentos, on the other hand, are for people who simply want to take a hot bath and clean up. Modern sentos may have a few mineral baths, but the traditional ones don't.

In the past 20 years, thanks to postwar bath-in-every-home affluency, the number of sentos has taken a nosedive. According to the National Public Bath Association, there were 13,050 throughout Japan in 1982; now there are 5,759.

Even in Tokyo, where sentos are still a part of city life (one is usually only a short walk from one's tatami mats), the number has declined from 2,306 to 1,148. Riding on any elevated train, they are distinguishable in Tokyo's urban landscape of powerlines, water tanks, and gaudy billboards by a brick or concrete chimney that rises above this clutter and has painted on it the name of the sento and the kanji character for hot water. Now and then a puff of black smoke might issue from their summits, a modern analogue to an archipelago of volcanoes.

The entrance is open, guarded only by a curtain that hangs to about shoulder height. On each side of the entrance, there are lockers for shoes and umbrellas. From there, men and women enter the changing rooms through separate doors. Immediately upon entering, a man or woman sitting on an elevated platform between the two changing rooms greets customers and accepts payments: (The price is fixed in each city. Tokyo is the most expensive, at 400 yen ($3.40); Okinawa the cheapest, at 200 yen. The average is a little over 300 yen. If the sento has a sauna — and many of the modern ones do — there is an additional charge for its use, usually an extra 400 yen.

Once you've paid — and maybe bought some soap and a towel (nothing is furnished) — you strip, tuck your clothes away in a locker, and enter the main bathing area in the same form you entered this world. The baths are at one end of the room, often beneath a mural of Mount Fuji or a craggy coastline where seagulls soar in a blue sky. Before slipping into a bath, you sit down and wash off. Japanese do their scrubbing in the sitting position, on a small stool.

The Japanese, contrary to the preconceived ideas many people have about them, are often tolerant of the faux pas of foreigners. They are particularly flattered when one chooses to do something that is typically Japanese, though this goodwill seems never to get much press.

What does is the dark side of the Japanese psyche. For example, a Westerner living living on Japan's northern most island, Hokkaido, was denied entry to a public bath, sued the owner, and the case was settled in his favor. The story made news in all the English-language newspapers.

His experience, though, is quite different from mine. I have never been denied entry to a sento, and I have been in ones from Hokkaido to Japan's southern most island, Kyushu. If the owner has a reaction at all, it is one of amusement.

Because the number of foreigners visiting sentos has increased, the National Sento Association has put together a poster — in Korean, Tagalog, Chinese, and English — which tells people how to take a bath. There are really only two major faux pas one can make at sento, however. The first is entering the building with one's shoes on. The other is soaping up while in the bath. Just by watching the Japanese, a foreigner can quickly figure out how what to do.

Sentos are, like crowded commuter trains, the great social equalizer. Husbands and wives, tired of the cramped bath at home that is about the size of a rain barrel, sometimes go to stretch their legs and indulge their children. Yakuza soldiers, their bodies bristling with tattoos, perhaps the tip of a finger missing, ignore the sign displayed at the entrance to most sentos (To all gangsters: Please refrain from entering these premises), and soap up next to retired men who spent their working lives at one company.

After a bath, in the dressing room, where there are benches and perhaps a view of a small Japanese garden, sento patrons smoke a cigarette or sip a juice or tea while cooling off. The peacefulness is only shattered by a husband, impatient with his wife's dillydallying, who shouts over the wall that separates the two dressing rooms, "Hey, hurry it up!"

— James Roth (j dot roth dot mail at gmail dot com)