Otsukimi
by Scott Hertrick
Everyone at the onsen is naked, but I'm somehow more naked than they are.
I still don't have a sense for celsius, so I can't be precise, but it's cold, cold enough that broad white flakes of snow are tumbling out of the slate-grey sky. I'm sitting outside, looking up as the snow swirls down in slanting streaks. I'm naked. The water I'm sitting in is steaming in the cold. Some of the snowflakes melt to rain the instant before they hit the water, leaving little circles, while others meet the surface and vanish. The water is the color of weak tea and trickles into the pool from a natural hot spring hidden in the landscaping behind plants and rocks. I'm not sure if the rocks are real or fake. My shoulders and chest are lobster-red from when I sat in deeper water. Now they are cooling in the air and collecting snowflakes.
Millenia of genetic and instinctual conditioning have finely tuned our visual response to movement, a biological fact one bemoans in a setting where visually reacting to movement means looking at naked bodies in a wide array of age, fitness, grooming, and, critically, proximity. My pristine moment of onsen reverie is ruptured by a pot-bellied man who strides unselfconsciously towards me, modesty towel held at arm's length from any of what it might be covering. Not that I was alone before, but the other guy in my pool was on the other side, leaning back behind some rocks, shoulder deep in the semi-opaque water, so he didn't register in quite the same way.
The muted silence that always seems to accompany falling snow— and, in this case is amplified in its aural blankness by the white-noise trickling of perpetual streams— is shattered by the wet slap of the striding gentleman's towel on the rocks as he eases himself into the pool directly in front of me. There’s a splash behind me, too, as one of the bathers in the pool over my shoulder stands up and makes his way toward the door, passing by two younger men who are chatting loudly, each sitting with their legs and arms draped over the edges of big buckets perched on wooden platforms.
I haven't gathered the courage to try the two buckets, the two faux rock pools, the aromatic bath (cedar plank circles this time) and the enticing but intimidating angled slab. There are two things stopping me from trying the slab, despite it coming highly recommended by a number of friends. First, the idea of lying naked on my back seems like a dramatic degree of exposure for both modesty and the elements. Second, and more critically, there is always someone on one half of it when I've been, and the climbing aboard and lowering myself onto the slab seems impossible to accomplish without a fairly aggressive degree of mooning. At this moment, the guy who just got in is scooping water with his hands onto his face, something that I thought was bad form.
The lack of clarity around what is and is not bad form kept me out of onsens for my first three years in Japan. It wasn't about the nudity, it was about being naked. Everyone at the onsen is naked, but I'm somehow more naked than they are.
The onsens are divided by gender, and the separate entrances have a color-coded banner at the door, a hanging curtain that's also a sign. Quiz: what gender is the color red? Let me remind you of the stakes before you answer.
On the other side of the door (you think) is a locker room space where people may already be naked, or the shower area where people are squatting on low plastic stools to wash themselves, or the baths themselves, and you can't speak the language, so if you guessed wrong and ended up in the wrong room, you have no way of explaining yourself to the startled, naked Japanese women you've accidentally barged in on.
Add to the mix that onsen are borderline religious sites, and that the whole cleaning/bathing process is highly structured and deeply formal. What signs there are within the onsen reminding you of what to do will be in Japanese at worst and cryptic half-translated English at best, and you can't really take out a phone in a locker room to open the camera for google translate without winning some sort of international award for creepiness. The real mysteries and complex procedures happen closer to the baths themselves, anyway, and at that point you're naked and have no pockets in which to hold your phone in the first place.
Millenia of genetic and instinctual conditioning have finely tuned our visual response to movement, a biological fact one bemoans in a setting where visually reacting to movement means looking at naked bodies in a wide array of age, fitness, grooming, and, critically, proximity. My pristine moment of onsen reverie is ruptured by a pot-bellied man who strides unselfconsciously towards me, modesty towel held at arm's length from any of what it might be covering. Not that I was alone before, but the other guy in my pool was on the other side, leaning back behind some rocks, shoulder deep in the semi-opaque water, so he didn't register in quite the same way.
The muted silence that always seems to accompany falling snow— and, in this case is amplified in its aural blankness by the white-noise trickling of perpetual streams— is shattered by the wet slap of the striding gentleman's towel on the rocks as he eases himself into the pool directly in front of me. There’s a splash behind me, too, as one of the bathers in the pool over my shoulder stands up and makes his way toward the door, passing by two younger men who are chatting loudly, each sitting with their legs and arms draped over the edges of big buckets perched on wooden platforms.
I haven't gathered the courage to try the two buckets, the two faux rock pools, the aromatic bath (cedar plank circles this time) and the enticing but intimidating angled slab. There are two things stopping me from trying the slab, despite it coming highly recommended by a number of friends. First, the idea of lying naked on my back seems like a dramatic degree of exposure for both modesty and the elements. Second, and more critically, there is always someone on one half of it when I've been, and the climbing aboard and lowering myself onto the slab seems impossible to accomplish without a fairly aggressive degree of mooning. At this moment, the guy who just got in is scooping water with his hands onto his face, something that I thought was bad form.
The lack of clarity around what is and is not bad form kept me out of onsens for my first three years in Japan. It wasn't about the nudity, it was about being naked. Everyone at the onsen is naked, but I'm somehow more naked than they are.
The onsens are divided by gender, and the separate entrances have a color-coded banner at the door, a hanging curtain that's also a sign. Quiz: what gender is the color red? Let me remind you of the stakes before you answer.
On the other side of the door (you think) is a locker room space where people may already be naked, or the shower area where people are squatting on low plastic stools to wash themselves, or the baths themselves, and you can't speak the language, so if you guessed wrong and ended up in the wrong room, you have no way of explaining yourself to the startled, naked Japanese women you've accidentally barged in on.
Add to the mix that onsen are borderline religious sites, and that the whole cleaning/bathing process is highly structured and deeply formal. What signs there are within the onsen reminding you of what to do will be in Japanese at worst and cryptic half-translated English at best, and you can't really take out a phone in a locker room to open the camera for google translate without winning some sort of international award for creepiness. The real mysteries and complex procedures happen closer to the baths themselves, anyway, and at that point you're naked and have no pockets in which to hold your phone in the first place.
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The deep irony of all of this stress and tension is that the whole purpose of an onsen is deep relaxation and the cleansing of stress and negative elements. And they are deeply relaxing, once you're in them. It's the getting there that's tough. But in the chill of winter, with snow falling, it's hard to say no when Olivia suggests we go, even though a sharp pinch of panic grips my chest for a moment and I start to think of excuses.
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The entrance has an industrial-scale genkan, with about fifty shoe lockers immediately adjacent. The genkan is like a mudroom, a space at the doorway before you actually enter the building by stepping up onto the building itself, where you take off your shoes. With the snow and the cold, the onsen is a popular place, with people passing us in both directions as we crouch to remove my son Beckett's tiny sneakers. We were to the side of the door, making use of a small bench to perch Beckett and secure our things while Olivia and I got out of our shoes. My own shoe removal is a clumsy affair, half-straddling the raised lip of the genkan, one shoe on, one off, half inside, half out.
For Japanese people, this is a practiced gesture. They step backwards out of their shoes, gracefully, so the toes remain pointed at the door and they can step back into them when it is time to leave. It's something I always remember after I'm caught in the weird one-shoe no-man's-land and resolve to try the next time. But today, maybe because of the slippery fresh snow melt on the tiled genkan or, I guiltily fear, because we are occupying the only bench, an older woman attempts the backwards shoe removal maneuver and loses her balance, gradually, glacially, toppling backward.
I have several different thoughts in the infinity of time she's falling. A part of me wants to lunge forward to try to catch her or cushion her fall. Another part of me worries I won't quite get there and will be left unable to explain my good intentions. And I remember the other old woman, at the train station, months ago, hauling groceries in several bags. One plastic bag ripped and spilled all her produce on the ground.
I was coming back from shopping myself and quickly rearranged my things, consolidating bags so I could offer her one to gather up her groceries. When I held it out to her, she glared at me as if I had spit in her face. So a part of me was thinking about what I had heard from colleagues who have lived here longer, that culturally, offering to help is shameful for the recipient, and the respectful thing to do is to not acknowledge the struggle so as to avoid causing embarrassment. Then again, another part of me cautioned, isn't that Western explanation and summation of cultural norms potentially fraught with all sorts of Great White Imperialist oversimplification and tyranny?
In the end, all of these parts did nothing, and the woman fell. Another woman went over to ask her if she was okay, and she laughed and said something back and picked herself up. Meanwhile, I'm standing there with one arm out toward the woman, a still-shoed foot in the genkan, the other socked and inside. Unbalanced, awkward, speechless.
I'm not even inside yet, and I'm already naked.
For Japanese people, this is a practiced gesture. They step backwards out of their shoes, gracefully, so the toes remain pointed at the door and they can step back into them when it is time to leave. It's something I always remember after I'm caught in the weird one-shoe no-man's-land and resolve to try the next time. But today, maybe because of the slippery fresh snow melt on the tiled genkan or, I guiltily fear, because we are occupying the only bench, an older woman attempts the backwards shoe removal maneuver and loses her balance, gradually, glacially, toppling backward.
I have several different thoughts in the infinity of time she's falling. A part of me wants to lunge forward to try to catch her or cushion her fall. Another part of me worries I won't quite get there and will be left unable to explain my good intentions. And I remember the other old woman, at the train station, months ago, hauling groceries in several bags. One plastic bag ripped and spilled all her produce on the ground.
I was coming back from shopping myself and quickly rearranged my things, consolidating bags so I could offer her one to gather up her groceries. When I held it out to her, she glared at me as if I had spit in her face. So a part of me was thinking about what I had heard from colleagues who have lived here longer, that culturally, offering to help is shameful for the recipient, and the respectful thing to do is to not acknowledge the struggle so as to avoid causing embarrassment. Then again, another part of me cautioned, isn't that Western explanation and summation of cultural norms potentially fraught with all sorts of Great White Imperialist oversimplification and tyranny?
In the end, all of these parts did nothing, and the woman fell. Another woman went over to ask her if she was okay, and she laughed and said something back and picked herself up. Meanwhile, I'm standing there with one arm out toward the woman, a still-shoed foot in the genkan, the other socked and inside. Unbalanced, awkward, speechless.
I'm not even inside yet, and I'm already naked.
Scott Hertrick teaches High School English at the American School in Japan. He lives in Chofu with his wife and two sons.
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