ni.chol.as

[Date: Tues 8th May]

I’m writing this on a shinkansen as it takes us past Mount Fuji. That’s quite an iconic Japanese thing, isn’t it?

Yesterday was our rest day. After two days really hammering Tokyo and Tokyo hammering us back we thought we’d take the day and relax. With a Shinkansen to take the following day, we took the opportunity to do our laundry and, as the laundrette was conveniently next door to an onsen, we thought we’d have a shot at that too.

Even the most traditional things here, like hot spring bathing, are frequently adulterated by technology, so the first thing to navigate was the vending machine selling entry tickets for a few hundred yen. Shoes off and into a locker at the entrance and then we hand the automatically printed entry ticket to the not-so-automatic girl at the front desk. She directs us left to the manly-man side of the baths. Inside is a gaggle of men stripping off or putting clothes back on, most are already butt naked and fussing about with combs or towels. We follow suit and stuff our belongings into another locker and head through a sliding door into the bathing area proper.

This is pretty much standard stuff you might have seen on TV or in manga. Rows of tiny stools, a plastic bowl to fill with hot water and a steamy mirror. Wash and scrub furiously and rinse off with a shower until no suds remain. It’s terribly bad form, we’re repeatedly informed, to get into the bath dirty or soapy. Once clean I try my hand at the bath. It’s 42 degrees centigrade, which is plenty hot enough to kill ignorant foreigners. I don’t even have baths this hot at home, and I like hot baths! The bath itself was pretty large, though I’ve nothing to compare it to. You could fit ten people in easily, and twenty if you didn’t mind bumping people. I say twenty, but really I mean nineteen since I soon discovered a cruel trick in the bath itself. The back of the bath is shaped like a letter E with three areas where you can lean up against the wall and there are jets of water and whatnot to keep you healthy and happy. The middle one of these was the one I chose to sit in and immediately felt very peculiar. Rob had gotten in by this point and I explained it to him as though I couldn’t feel my hands. It was like there were really strong jets of water but there was no pressure to go with it. I was confused and only realised after evacuating a minute or so later that above my head was a sign “DENKI”. Electricity. The bastards were electrocuting me! Apparently, it’s supposed to replicate the sensation of swimming with electric eels.

I only lasted four or five minutes in the baths. It’s way too hard to stay in there much longer. I was bright red when I got out and dutifully mocked by Barry who had yet to experience the pain. My second time back in the water I lasted even less time and nearly fainted when I got out and had a dizzying rush of blood away from my head. I wonder how many people die in this way every year, drowning after fainting in hot baths.