The Pain and Pleasure of a Bathhouse Experience

For my first blog of the New Year, I decided to look back over my previous emails, blogs, and notes from 2011. I found this recollection on my bathhouse experience in Japan that I thought you would enjoy reading. The irony of the experience is too good to not share!

OMG, today was a very interesting experience at the bathhouse with my friend Patty. I was terrified initially to go to the bathhouse, but I am glad I went. I am such a germ phoebe and had many stereotypical ideas what it would be like…none of which were true. The bathhouse was segregated (men on one side of the building with a wall between and women on the other), but it was full on nudity throughout the visit. The Japanese people take their bathhouse experience very seriously. There were three soaking pools in the outdoor area, and four indoors. Each pool had a different temperature degree, jet speed, and water “flavor”. I would have been lost and made hundreds of social blunders without my friend Patty interpreting the whole process. There was an entire ritual of taking off my shoes, putting them in the locker, getting a bag of towels, paying for my services through a vending machine (people don’t touch money much), giving my ticket to the appointment taker, confirming my appointment for which service I wanted in addition to the soaking (i.e. scrub, massage, etc.), getting undressed, showering, and which towel to use. I chose the full body scrub, oil and massage for $6K Yen. OMG it was an experience!

I was told to soak for at least 30 minutes before my scrub so that my skin would be softer…which I did. Then I went into a small room and lay on a table (nude). There was a very small Korean woman that covered my face with a hot towel and wrapped my hair up in a towel. I am small in size, but this woman was half the size of me. She had on both of her hands what appeared to be “rough socks”. I really did not have a clue what the actual fabric was but it felt like sand paper. OMG it did hurt but I kept telling myself “no one ever died from this, so get through it!” The woman scrubbed EVERY inch of my entire body including every fold and crease except for the two areas with “hair” (head and you know where else). Now again, let me remind you….when I say scrub, she scrubbed very vigorously and it hurt but it oddly also felt pleasurable when she finally stopped and my skin was tingling. Later, she poured hot oily water all over my raw body, which again hurt, but not for long. Then she proceeded to oil me more and then gave a vigorous massage all over my body again. I have had massages before, but this one was the best by far. Somewhere during all of this, I finally forgot that I was a germ phoebe and just tried to “enjoy” the experience.

As an addendum to this email, I have to disclose that two days after the bathhouse experience, I had to go to sick call on base in Japan for an allergic reaction. I had always known I was allergic to sulfa, but little did I know that the pools that I had soaked in for hours were loaded with natural volcanic sulfates! Needless to say, I never went back and repeated my bathhouse experience, but it was an experience I will never forget—both good and bad!