I watch a lot of Asian movies and I see a lot of public baths in them.
Why would people choose to bathe themselves in a public bath rather than in their own bathroom?
Also, if you’ve been to these public baths, I’d love to hear about your experiences in them (cost, cleanliness, etiquette, etc.).
Hello! I’ve been wanting to subscribe to the message board but never really got around to it, but reading your question finally pushed me over the edge since I thought I might actually be helpful. 
The public baths are called sentou and can be found in various nooks and crannies around the city. There’s usually little advertisement for them, other than the telltale cloth flaps with the Japanese kanji for hot water written across them. As for my experiences, going to the public baths here in Kyoto can be just as a social outing as going to a bar or karaoke. My friends and I tend to go on the weekend during the night as a way to wind down.
I personally enjoy the baths because it’s a much different experience from bathing in my bathtub in my cramped little bathroom. The baths are very clean and tidy. Upon entering the sentou, one puts their shoes in a locker and takes the key. The price around here is about $3.50 each time. In the inside locker room, you have another locker where you put your clothes and personal items. At some sentou you can pay to use a towel and body products, but my friends and I just bring our own.
Upon going inside, one is expected to wash themselves entirely and thoroughly in the showers before entering the baths. The baths are like jacuzzis- very hot jacuzzis- with some differences. There is one that is extremely hot (I can only stand 10 minutes in it!) one that is not so hot with jets, one which is infused with electric currents (too scared to try that one!), a medicinal one that is deep green in color and smells of eucalyptus (my favorite), and one that is pure cold water. My friends and I go in and out of them for a good hour; the important part is remembering that one must rinse themselves off in between each time.
I was nervous at first, of course. I wasn’t keen on the idea of walking around naked in front of my friends, let alone Japanese women, but after a while you tend to forget about it. Some of the women try to talk to us, but most of them tend to leave us alone. At worst, we were shooed out of the cold spa by a little old lady so she could occupy it. You come out feeling very refreshed, relaxed, warm, and ready for a good night’s sleep.
It’s quite the experience. It’s something that I could never see working back home. If you ever get a chance to go to one, do try it!
Hope this helps!
I went to a Japanese public bath in the mountains. It was fed by a hot spring.
There was a men’s side and a women’s side, they were separated by a big wall. Gone are the days when the men and women were separated merely by a rope (or by nothing); although, I suppose in some places the old ways remain.
IMHO, these public baths are mostly cultural artifacts from a bygone era, for which Japanese people pay for the change of pace.
We just got back from one tonight, it’s a regular outing in our family.
Tonight we went to an onsen (hot spring) about 45 minutes from our town in the foothills of the mountains. We paid about $6 each. I am a bit lonely these days as I only have sons, and now the youngest one won’t come into the ladies side with me, despite it being OK to about 8 years old (though I don’t like such big boys being in there as there are some who are too into tits and bums by that stage…) So boys, hub and grandfather hopped off to the mens’ side and I went in by my own for some quality alone time.
There is a strict ettiquette about not staring and on the whole people do keep to it. Actually my mother in law even though she is Japanese is one of the worst for staring and then, Oh horrors, POINTING. Luckily (sorry MIL) she has just had back surgery and is not up to such outings for a few weeks.
As has been pointed out you must wash thoroughly before getting into the water - the places we go almost all have shampoo and soap provided. Today’s place had six or so inside baths including one that has black-coffee coloured water which is smooth and almost soapy feeling - it leaves the skin feeling so soft and soothed. (That is natural to our area.) There was also a jacuzzi and a similar kind of thing but was shallow and long with a “pillow” made of a wide steel tube with cold water running through it. You lie down in the bath and jets massage your shoulders as your head is cool and your body half boiled. Lovely. There was also a very cold plunge pool, a sauna and two all-around showers that squirt you at four levels all around when you get in. The best of all about that place though is the rotemburo - the outside bath. There are two, one is a huge boulder-lined pool big enough for 15 people easily, looking up a wide rolling lawn that leads into the forest. Then up the hill a few yards is a wooden roofed pavilion with a scented herb bath. Tonight it was snowing and it is a lovely feeling to sit in hot, hot water, with cold snowflakes falling on your face and shoulders. The snowflakes feel sort of hot and pinchy as they land on you! It is very goosepimply rushing from the hot indoor baths to the outdoor hot water, but lovely when you get in. And on the way back you are so cooked that you can amble back indoors with no sense of hurry even in minus temperatures.
Everyone has a bath towel which is left in the changing room. If the room has baskets rather than lockers you unfold the bath towel and lay it over all your clothes. Then you have a small towel which is about a foot wide and about two and a half feet long, which women will drape over a forearm and hold dangling over their breasts and privates. Of course it isn’t that covering but as I said before, most people aren’t looking. I have also done the mixed bathing thing and the men tend to fold the towel in half and do what I call “The Genital Clutch” wheere they hold the towel over their hand and then just sort of bunch up the jewels into it as they walk around.
When the kids were younger I loved doing the mixed bathing thing as it is so much better to have two adults to two toddlers when there is deep water about. The two onsens we went most often to were far into the mountains with only very simple wooden huts for changing in. In one place the women’s hut allowed you to get into the water which was completely opaque white behind a screen. You then bobbed down and scuttled out with only shoulders showing. Then men just stepped down into the water so that as they went by their nuts were at nose-level… The other onsen there was no screen at all so there was about a three yard dash but then the water was a bright rust orange, so again once under that nothing showed anyway.
It is a really nice thing to do with friends or family. I have climbed a hot waterfall in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of male coworkers and then upon finding a pool in the middle of the waterfall, but not having known about it, we all stripped to underwear and got in. Of course we were only wearing pants and top wear anyway as the waterfall was about 8 inches deep and the resulting backsplash as we walked through it had rendered wearing our only trousers we had with us a stupid thing to do, so we’d left them all in a bundle at the bottom of the hill. Nobody felt it at all odd and nobody ever commented about the nudity again. The actual hike and the waterfall were discussed on many occasions.
Japanese people are very unbothered by nudity. Bathtime nuditiy and sexiness somehow are different sides of a line that I think westerners don’t draw.
When I used to live in Sangenjaya, just a little outside of Shibuya in Tokyo, there were several public baths all around the neighborhood. A lot of people living in the area were students, and the apartments they could afford were generally one-room deals that had sinks and toilets but no baths of their own. Just about all the bathhouses included coin-op washers and dryers so they could do their laundry as well.
I never used them, so I can’t tell you any more than that.
The other type of public baths are up in the mountains in resort areas, and are more like spas than just places to wash up. I’ve tried these, and like Hokkaido Brit describes, they’re pretty nice. As for the nudity, they’re not bothered, so I’m not bothered.
While they are still common in Asia, public baths have a long history in Europe and the US, dating from times when many city dwellers didn’t have access to running water. In Albany, NY, there’s still a public bath, though it’s been converted into a swimming pool.
The died out in the US by the mid-20th century.
They still have them in Korea, although the need for them is dying out. The average Korean house (or apartment, I should say) 20 years ago did not have a bathtub. Some of them didn’t even have a shower. You had a showerhead coming out of the wall but the bathroom was usually so small that there was no room for a separate enclosed space inside of it. So in order to take a bath you had to go to the public baths. The way they work has already been described in detail above, so I won’t get into that.
Nowadays all houses and apartments have bathtubs, so public baths have become more of a social thing than anything else. A lot of public baths have added saunas and sleeping rooms and even computer labs, so people can spend their entire day hanging out there. It’s a nice thing to do after a night of hard drinking - I speak from personal experience.
I think enough has been said about the physical and logistical parts of public bathing in Asia, particularly Japan, but I could say a few things about the psychological parts of it.
Firstly, prepare to be ogled. By men. By old men with withering body parts and leering-yet-innocent stares. This is normal and A-OK in Japanese society. I have never had the privilege or luck to find a co-ed bath, but I imagine the staring is even worse in those. Note, it’s not normally OK to stare as as a foreigner, but it’s ok to counterstare if being stared at. This is called a Gaijin Optic Blast.
Second, and related to the staring, everyone will think you have a huge package. American men are viewed as having huge donkey schlongs. You are Canadian but they wont be able to know the difference. You will be subconsciously praised as King of Dicks. This goes hand-in-hand with the uncomfortable staring. Some old men might even joke around about you. They wont expect you to understand what they’re saying.
Third, I hope you like seeing old man balls. You’ve been warned.
Very interesting thread so far, and with less than ten posts!
We’ve only had one account from a Korean person. I’d like to hear about how they differ from Japanese public baths.
Like Hokkaido Brit pointed out above, staring is rude. Some people do it, but it’s not normal or accepted behaviour. Staring back shows a similar lack of etiquette.
I just want to highlight one important distinction about that baths in Japan -
sentou are literally public bath-houses, places where people go to actually cleanse themselves, usually because they don’t have a bathing facility in their own home. As to why someone wouldn’t, it used to because it was something of a luxury, now more because in some incredibly crowded places it makes more sense to skimp on the indoor bath and just bathe elsewhere.
onsen are places where you can go have a nice long soak in volcanic hot spring water. It’s said that when a municipality drills for drinking water, if they strike hot water then they abandon plans and build an onsen hotel instead. Different springs have different water characteristics based on the geology of the area… a sulfur smell is common, sometimes there is plant debris from soft coal, and once place I went actually had a gasoline-type smell from bubbling through petroleum. It was milky white and really softened the skin, but it left you smelling like gasoline. Of course some places just have a really nice location and no actual volcanic water, so they heat their own.
In addition to the hotel-style onsen, many people find an appeal in the most rustic, natural possible outdoor hot springs. Occasionally you’ll be driving along and see a crude changing room by an outdoor pool that is partially exposed to the road. In fact one pool I saw in northern Hokkaido was on a beach in the actual tidal zone… there was a hot water vent where someone had excavated a tub-sized depression around it. It was exposed when the tide was low and completely visible for all directions around it.
The most memorable place I ever went was undoubtedly the Hinode onsen on the northern Hokkaido coast, where in february you can soak outdoors on top of a seaside cliff with snow coming down all around you, looking down at the cold silent sea covered with ice floes. I think it doesn’t get any better than that.
Yet when I step on a subway train in Tokyo, I seem to have a spotlight on me. At the onsen, I was quite the spectacle. Yes, I agree with you that by official Japanese cultural standards it’s rude, but staring at foreigners, at least for me, seems to be omnipresent and accepted.
I stare back because it’s the only defense I have. It’s either that or pretend I’m not being stared at, which is too passive and wimpy for my taste.
Books have been written about how the Japanese follow the usual cultural norms when dealing with foreigners, except when it’s more convenient, comfortable, or entertaining not to do so. Fact of life. It’s not really uncommon in any country.
In general people aren’t going to stare unless they’re either bumpkins who never learned much politeness in general, or xenophobes who view foreigners as space aliens with antennae (well, one big antenna, anyway…).