Utopia: Retroactive Post

So the next day, after going to Nagoya Jo and Tsurumai Koen, we decided to go to this public bath house, or onsen, since I had heard of them and I knew that they were a Japanese tradition.

Maybe I first need to explain how baths in general work here in Japan. Actually, let me show you what the ofuro *bath looks like:

So on the top, is obviously a bathtub, and the other is a picture of the area for you to shower. Notice that unlike US bathtubs, the shower area is NOT the bathtub. This is because it is typical for Japanese to take a hot bath at night, to help them go to sleep. However, if you are a member of a large family, it gets to be very expensive if you have to fill and refill the bath water with each persons' bath. Therefore, the process here in Japan is that usually the father first takes a shower to clean himself before going to soak in the bath tub, and then the next person follows that process all the way down to the youngest member of the household, with everyone sharing the same bathwater.

Now I know that that might seem gross at first, and I was a little weirded out by this, until I realized its practicality, as well as the fact that it's virtually the same as if you were in a hot tub with other people at the same time. In fact, that ends up being grosser, since most people don't shower before they get in the hot tub. The only significant difference is that you're naked in the ofuro, and you're not, unless you're skinny-dipping, in a hot tub.

Plus, one really neat thing about Japanese baths is that they're a lot hotter than US baths, which makes them more like hot tubs. My aunt had said that she was going to take a bath after my uncle after dinner, and I was surprised that he had left the bathroom some time ago, but my aunt was still cleaning up the dishes and everything, so I asked her if she was still planning to take a bath. She answered yes, so I asked her, puzzled, if the water wasn't cold by now, since my uncle had finished a long time ago, and she explained that in Japan, the water is all regulated by a central heating control in the kitchen. It is especially used for baths. Of course, you can modify the temperature of your water by adding more cold water, but this way you can set it to be up to 46 degrees Celsius and get a really hot bath going. Anyway, that's how Japanese baths work at home.

In public, they work much the same way. Everyone showers and then you go into a hot tub, but you're doing it nude. My uncle had asked if I was okay with that plan, since it would involve being naked in front of other people, but I said that I was up for the "Charrenge," and that I had to do it, because even if I'm not accustomed or comfortable being nude in public, I didn't want to miss out on a tradition that I wouldn't be able to experience once I got back to the US. So we went to this place called Utopia. My aunt told me that men and women did bathe separately, so I didn't need to worry about that. Now please forgive me in advance for all the blurry pictures, but I was pretty drunk when I took them.

At first I was expecting a kind of wooden building or something like what I've read about of Middle Age bath houses, but this is nothing like that. It's completely modern, and very much geared to the family-oriented crowds. It has saunas and cool water pools as well as normal hot tubs, both indoors and out, and some of the baths even have different bath minerals added to them for arthritis and rheumatism, etc...Outside of the ofuro, you get changed into one of their yukatas, and you can go to the gaming arcade, they used to have karaoke boxes, go and get a massage or a pedicure, sleep in one of the quiet rooms, watch a movie in their movie theater, play go, which is like chess, or go and have a drink and food downstairs in their restaurants. It's great.

My uncle had to deal with an emergency at work, so we went ahead. I took a bath, chilled in the sauna till I couldn't stand it any longer, dunked in the super cold bath, and then went back to the bath and sauna. After we were sufficiently warm and pink-cheeked, my aunt and I got drinks and ice cream to help cool us down. I watched this movie called Shinobi, which I really liked, even though I didn't understand it fully since it was in Japanese and no subtitles. But it was still good. I'll look for it on dvd and maybe bring it to the US.

After the movie, my uncle had arrived and taken a bath. He had brought Chu-hi and a canned cocktail drink for me, since they were way more expensive to buy inside. I didn't realize how thirsty I must have been, because I killed that drink. Of course, I also failed to recognize just how little food I had eaten throughout the day, because that one can with 5 lcohol hit my system like a series of shots and before I knew it, I was drunk. My aunt had the best time getting funny pictures of me, so please enjoy: Utopia She'd make you proud, Pat. Anyway, it was a good experience, and if any of you are ever here, I'd recommend that you see for yourselves. All right, that's all for these pics!