The Weekly Screed (#715)

“I came… for the waters”
by David Benjamin

KOWAKIDANI, Japan — You don’t have to go far in Japan — maybe 100 yards in any direction — to find something weird. On our way here, we passed by the alleged cradle of the kamaboko, the classic Japanese “shocking-pink fishcake.” Considering the popularity of kamaboko in celebratory Japanese cuisine, it’s no surprise that the town of Odawara would claim the glory of being first among fishcakes. The American equivalent would be the birthplace of the hot dog.

Alas, in our eagerness to reach our onsen, we passed the Fishcake Museum with barely a snigger. We were onsen-bound. We couldn’t wait to shed our duds and take the plunge. Japan is a nation whose fondness for sexual repression rivals only the Puritan US of A. Yet, for centuries, the tediously formal, pathologically uptight and insufferably stuffy Japanese have been shamelessly indulging themselves by lounging about, drinking saké and wearing washcloths on their heads, in steaming basins of volcanic water, boys and girls together buck naked.

Alas again, this tradition is fading. In the high-end onsen where we spent the night, the management segregates men and women in two common-bath rotenburo. Hotlips and I, who like to bathe together, deplore this arrangement — which is why we took a room that has its own little tub on the terrasse, replenished constantly with a steady dribble of steamy water from the fiery heart of the adjacent mountain.

At home, I shower hurriedly and rush to work. At an onsen, I take a dozen baths a day — always washing first, lest I soil the water for my fellow bathers.

Wet fellowship — even sharing a tub with strangers — is the essence of onsen. Hotlips and I once visited a spring called Shiobara, which required — from our sleeping quarters — a steep descent, wearing just a cotton robe and a pair of ill-fitting plastic slippers, down a hundred-odd narrow, slippery wooden steps. At the bottom, overlooking the lazy Hokigawa River, several sunken baths awaited, side-by-side, each steaming in the chilly air, each a slightly different temperature.

I seek out the “coolest” tub, usually about 44 degrees Centigrade, because I’m a gaijin (foreigner), unaccustomed to the uniquely Japanese thrill of being boiled alive and feeling my brains bubble inside my skull. I have observed — with the sort of awe usually reserved for sword-swallowers and cliff-divers — a pair of leather-skinned Japanese old-timers as they soaked, neck-deep and nude, in water that would send me to an emergency room with full-body blisters.

Shiobara had one such tub. I tested it once, for an entire nine seconds, just to show Hotlips that I’m not chicken.

My screams set dogs barking as far the foothills of Mount Fuji.

Shiobara’s tubs are sociably aligned. During one of our dips, we bathed beside a vivacious naked woman who was hiking the river and sampling onsen along the way. She plied us with questions, answered ours and lingered with us merrily. We shared with her an intimacy more immediate, warm and even sensuous than we would have felt if we’d all been wearing pants. The Japanese are hardly a spontaneous —or notably convivial — people. But strip them down and drop them into a cloudy pool smelling faintly of sulphur and barely cooler than a lobster pot, and they turn into a veritable Shriners convention.

This all works, among men and women of all ages, shapes and sizes mingling together in the nude, because there is an unwritten code of onsen etiquette. It requires strict eye contact and the mutual suspension of prurience. Yes, you may peek. But to stare, or to even hint — by word, deed, wink or innuendo — that any of this steamy frolic has to do with sex is the pinnacle of bad taste.

That’s why everyone was appalled by the appearance of several ignorant young women at an onsen called Hacho no Yu, in the rugged valley of the Kinugawa. Rather than draping themselves scantily with a terry-cloth tenugui, the little white towel that serves all purposes at an onsen, the girls were obscenely overdressed — in bikinis. They were covering up — and thereby drawing lewd attention to — things that everyone in every onsen has always silently agreed to first uncover and then overlook. These brazen hussies made us all feel naked.

Our favorite hour at Hacho no Yu, our favorite onsen, was after midnight. By then, the other guests had spread their futon and succumbed to the sedative mixture of hot water and warm rice wine. Hotlips and I would climb mossy stone steps to a round basin — eight feet in diameter and perfect gaijin temperature —whose vista included the inn and the river. One night, a young hiker in search of a bath before pitching his tent in the woods, emerged from the darkness. He undressed swiftly, slapped a tenugui over his lap and slipped goose-pimply into the soup, where we all soaked and chatted as though waiting for tables at TGI Friday’s.

One wee-hour April morning at Hacho no Yu, we had hurried shivering up the clammy steps and plunged in, glad for the shocking warmth in the midst of the chill. No hikers appeared. The only sound from the forest was the wind in its branches. Otherwise, we heard only a trickle of hot water and the hiss of a nearby waterfall. We were just getting wrinkly when a gentle spring snow began to fall.

It was invisible almost ‘til it touched us. In the instant before melting on our steamy skin, each snowflake was a white-hot spark that left no mark. The sky, it seemed, was sending down a paradox of fire and ice to excite our senses and confuse our nerves.

Such moments might all disappear into mere memory. The surfer-girl bikini team at Hacho no Yu were an omen. True onsen —no walls between genders — are a threatened refuge. They’ve retreated into what we call the deep inaka, whose chaste and neighborly denizens still understand that the measure of modesty is how you behave when you ain’t got a stitch.