Male, 30. In short, I used to be body-shy, but I’m not at all anymore. If I had to be naked in public for some reason only two things would give me pause: 1) I’m a grower, not a shower; 2) If everybody else wasn’t naked too I’d feel a bit weird, like showing up to a party in shorts and a t-shirt when everyone else is wearing formal dress.
I used to be shy when I first started doing sports. A year on the swim and springboard diving teams cleared that right up. Speedos are smaller (and tighter) than my underwear and most swim meets have at least 100 to 200 people watching, if you include both spectators and competitors. Some of the schools we visited in competition did not have enough space in the locker room to hold all of us so we often had to change on the deck. Which means at the side of the pool, in full view of everyone there. Newbies quickly learned how to wrap a towel so that a sudden unexpected tug would not put them on display.
Since swim season is (inexplicably) from January to May, we were usually much more worried about getting warm under the heaven-sent hot running water than about modesty when we showered. You also wanted to get completely dry and warm afterward, so stripping off your suit was pretty normal. Some guys, usually the new ones, changed under a towel even in the locker room, but we got so used to the situation after a while that most of us rarely bothered by the second year.
Looking at the team photos, I can’t imagine why I was self conscious about my body. If I’d known then how (comparatively) good I looked without clothes on I don’t think I could have resisted using my powers for evil. I recently got myself back in some semblance of good shape. It took six months of being very good about what I ate and working out almost every day before I felt kind of satisfied. I still look only about half as good as I did then.
I’ve been living in Japan for the last four years and Japanese bathing customs have killed the little modesty I had left. If you live in Japan, you will eventually visit a public bath. Bathing is practically a national pasttime. Japanese custom at onsen or sentou (two kinds of public baths) is to scrub yourself under a shower or using buckets of water from the bath in a bathing area separate from the tub, clean yourself completely in the bathing area before you enter the tub so that you aren’t getting the tub water dirty, then get into the bath and soak for a while. The bath looks kind of like a big hot tub. Some of them are even as big as a small swimming pool.
This is done in the presence of lots of other naked guys and kids who come with their parents. Japanese are often very curious about non-Japanese people since more than 95 percent of the population shares the same race and culture. Cue lots of curious stares and not-so-subtle glances to see what “it” looks like. At least the curiosity is non-sexual, so I don’t have to fend off interested looks, unlike some health clubs in the US. C’mon guys, it’s a gym, not a bath house.
Mixed-sex public bathing used to be the norm in Japan but has not been practiced widely for quite a long time now. There are a still few onsen left that don’t have segregated pools though. I’ve been to one once. Now, before you get the wrong idea, there’s nothing sexual about Japanese bathing in the first place. In the second place, a gaggle of 80-something grannies is not my target audience. Knowing how brutally outspoken old women can be I was grateful I couldn’t understand some of what they were saying. What I could understand was quite enough to make me red from more than the near-boiling water.
