Sento percento

[imomus]

Hisae and I spent a couple of hours last night at Spaworld, a supersento near Osaka zoo. It's a kind of theme park of bathing, a succession of themed rooms in various national styles. Imagine the British Museum filled with water and naked people dangling small orange "modesty towels" in front of their genitals as they wade from exhibit to exhibit, room to room, water gadget to water gimmick. I thought I'd try to add an objective element to the subjective impression of the bliss of a visit to Spaworld by breaking it down to you in percentages.

1. Percentage of the day this spa is open: 100% (it's 24/7).

2. Percentage the 1000 yen entrance fee ($8.60 or €7.10) goes up by if you bathe after midnight: 100%.

3. Percentage of bathers on the men's floor who were gaijin while I was bathing: 3%.

4. Percentage of bathers on the men's floor who were little girls while I was bathing: 10%.

5. Little girls (aged 5-8, bathing with their fathers) are 50% sexy with their clothes on, but only 20% sexy naked, when they exactly resemble little boys without penises.

6. Percentage of time I spent in each bath: 12% in steam room and sauna, 21% outside in rotenburo area, enjoying the cool rain, 6% in a wooden barrel, 15% in a traditional Japanese cedar bath, 18% in the Arabic room, 19% in Indian jacuzzi room, 7% in Balinese flower bath, 2% in Egyptian sunbed room.

7. Percentage of bathers on women's floor who had navel piercings, according to Hisae: 15%.

8. Percentage of bathers on women's floor who were Gothic Lolitas, according to Hisae: 1%.

9. Percentage of bathers on women's floor who were Chinese or Koreans: 16%.

10. Percentage of "red wine bath" which was red in colour: 0% (it was, in fact, green).

11. Percentage I used to feel anxious about appearing naked in public: 87%. Percentage I now feel anxious about it: 5%.

12. Percentage of the time I found myself checking men's penises before their faces as they approached: 85%.

13. Percentage you feel clean after an hour in the baths at Spaworld: 110%.

14. Percentage of alcohol in the nama biru you sip with your fried isakaya meal at the base of the Osaka Tower afterwards: 5%.

15. Percentage of bodily well-being you experience at this point: 99.9%.

Comments

[dehumidifier.livejournal.com]

Another theme park walking the line between awesome and creepy, much like epcot or las vegas.

[dmlaenker.livejournal.com]

What's creepy about EPCOT?

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Alsomst all theme parks are creepy. Of course, some of them are also awesome.

[lil-octopie.livejournal.com]

ahh i am envious. i really hope i get a chance to try spaworld next time i'm in osaka. or course there is the whole issue of whether i go by myself or with fellow travellers and the anxiety of being nude.

hope you get a chance to visit the lovely whale shark at the aquarium.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's even a shark room at Spaworld! It was on the women's floor, so I won't see it until our next visit (they rotate the floors every month or so), but Hisae tells me the sharks are very small ones, mixed with carp, swimming about under the glass bottom of one of the pools.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

I love the baths depicted in the movie Spirited Away and wish I could visit them. This place looks even better!

[shiu.livejournal.com]

that one is modelled after dogo onsen in matsuyama!

[jina---.livejournal.com]

yes! that's exactly what I had in mind.

this place looks a lot like it. and better.

somebody told me that the cockroaches over there are huge!,btw...is that true, i wonder?

[armandae.livejournal.com]

What is the % of places that won't let gaikokujin in who have large full-torso wrapped "wan ponto" tattoos? (It's a tribal piece, but covers the full upper back, down both sides, and across the pelvis)

I'll be going back in June, and hoping to spend more time outside of Tokyo. Osaka sounds appealing. Esp the superonsen ;p

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hisae says 99% of sentos will bar someone with the tattoos you describe. But I did see a very heavily tatooed guy, obvious yakuza (big blue fish design covering his whole back), in a sento in Amerikamura, Osaka, last year. The place is called Shimizuyu. He was staring people down, spent a long time washing. I suspect he was allowed in (against the usual sento mores) because everyone was too scared to complain, or he was a friend of the owners, or something. Anyway, I doubt they would allow foreigners with tattoos do the same.

[heinzbitte.livejournal.com]

I read this sometimes, and would you mind if I were to added you?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

No need to ask!

[akabe.livejournal.com]

gee you did go in there. i lived near the place for almost a year and never ventured to go in, the BIGness kind of freaked me out - like straight out of a rem koolhaas bible. you are in a great part of osaka - many would say minami is osaka. have you checked out 新世界 , is it still the same? in 2001 it was still the utopia gone wrong : cinema's advertising john cassavetes' gloria (survival not revival), the plainest looking (kneelength wooolen skirt and polyester blouse) transsexual subculture that must have ever existed some spooky kabuki and lots more.
then cross the big road into 新今宮 walk a bit inwards and you'll find the time trip of your life. narrow red-light streets operating and looking like yoshiwara would have before the meiji restoration. no shit. these kind of places have been officially closed down some 150 years ago but trust osaka. actually not even many osaka people know about these (or would like not to know) so shhhhh!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Shinsekai / Tsutenkaku is our backyard (we're living up the hill near Tennoji station) and we often go to the "spooky kabuki" theatre there. In fact we're thinking of going tonight to the "fake Takarazuka" evening they're holding there. It's the most sordid, bastardised kabuki theatre I've seen, with the actors bursting into pop hits in the middle of plays, and stuffing 10,000 yen notes into their kimonos. And next door there's this totally empty fleapit porno cinema owned by the same people, with high-backed "privacy" loveseats. I've seen the tranny whores too, they're waiting right outside when you leave the kabuki theatre.

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

12. Percentage of the time I found myself checking men's penises before their faces as they approached: 85%.

I knew it...and you wonder why audiences do the same at your gigs. Bah, humbug!
I want to skinny dip in a supersento too.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Percentage of sharks that will take your willy for their long-lost mother: 88%

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

my mum's insane. i miss her.

[cityramica.livejournal.com]

ayy
wonderful.
beautiful.

[benchilada.livejournal.com]

Percent that I am stunned that somebody hasn't jumped all over you for this:
5. Little girls (aged 5-8, bathing with their fathers) are 50% sexy with their clothes on, but only 20% sexy naked = 78%

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

I'm with you there... 50% seems like a high number to toss out to something that you would not engage in some sort of intercourse with, but maybe the whole world is some %age sexy for our protagonist.

I'd be curious as to how sexy Hisae is, or how sexy the fried food he ate was, or the 85% of face-preceeding penises.

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

Wait... on second glance, you entered eight seperate "baths" in an hour? It's not a race, man.

Do you experience the same problem I do when I go to onsen with (japanese) women? When deciding on a preset time to meet up outside, I always want much longer in the baths than my companion. Or is the "obstacle course" hopping from bath to bath your normal m.o.?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm pretty jumpy. Same in art galleries or museums, I do 'em quick. I now expect real life to go as fast as broadband!

[pyrop.livejournal.com]

Percentage of bathers on the men's floor who were little girls while I was bathing

What, so they stopped being little girls once you left?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Didn't you read that part of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity? It's the best bit!

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

I love onsen, but I am a little wary of public baths ever since a bunch of them got caught skimping on the sanitizing. You can get some nice fungi from public baths, making it all the more important to only patronize large establishments.



And Osaka is my second hometown. Enjoy it!

[(Anonymous)]

destroy that foreign fungi before it threatens america!!!

Tattoos and Tokyo

[(Anonymous)]

I ran into Danny Elfman at a goth themed party in Tokyo last fall in Aoyama. He said that he was asked to leave the pool area of his hotel (I think it was the Hyatt, but I can't recall) by a young staffwoman because of his tattoo, a really innocuous gila monster/lizard type thing on his leg. He showed it to me, and I couldn't believe how the staff could have sweated that! Anyway, he tagged on something in a frank and detached way to the end of his story about how if tattoos don't pass inspection at such an upper-class hotel like that catering to non-Japanese celebs (who are loaded with tattoos), then can they expect to cater to the kind of clientele that he represents? Hummm, speaking of stars and tats, I wonder of Mr. Schrock ever got turned out of a sento for his. Rod, are you out there?

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

u gotta be cautious with the pecker. every country is different. ere in london 16 the birds are ripe. i mean ripe means ripe juicy lucy. kentucky might be different i don't know. what do u reckon?

The Age Of Consent, some thoughts

[(Anonymous)]

1. Emotionally you don’t know if you like something until you’ve tried it and, like whiskey, sometimes it takes getting used to. Whether you are fourteen or forty.

2. The only way around the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ factor is eduction, not a law.

3. Many girls, smart enough to realise they will never become hotshot city lawyers, want to be mothers as soon as possible. Every biological fact encourages that decision, every financial moan and groan discourages it. Personally I would let people breed – to hell with the Woolworths pick’n’mix people are swindled into thinking of as ‘careers’. The world RUNS on debt, why should YOU be a freak?

4. Deserting young ‘dads’ just need intimidation; it’s why God gave brothers baseball bats. Fact.

[(Anonymous)]

"Little girls (aged 5-8, bathing with their fathers) are 50% sexy with their clothes on, but only 20% sexy naked"

Does that mean you would chat up half the clothed ones but only shag a smaller proportion of them once you got them naked? Or does "sexy" not pertain to your sexual organs in this case? (All of this assuming you were unattached.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If thoughts always led so simply to actions, we'd all have to be lobotomized to keep us on the straight and narrow.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

66 comments of heated debate already! And we all thought that Momus was up for some relaxing time in Osaka... but he can't let go of the Western confrontational side of his brain.

Keep 'em submissive, boys!

[(Anonymous)]

"Sergeant R. P. Tyler is one of five investigators who track child porn for the San Bernadino County Sheriff's department. He says that the Japanese child pornography market is the largest in the world. The quantity of teen porn available in Japan far exceeds the amount produced by Europeans during their peak years in the 1970s. Made-in-Japan schoolgirl material is available internationally on the Internet. Tyler says that most on-line discussion of where to get such porn focuses on Japan. The country has no laws against child porn. Japanese police say there are about 1,200 commercial child pornography Internet sites in Japan."

Re: Keep 'em submissive, boys!

[alandriscoll.livejournal.com]

Sounds about right.

[akabe.livejournal.com]

geez the old debate crawled up. the more academic and removed from reality the beter...

first thing that struck me about osaka when i went there for a few days in late summer 05 was that people had bodies. while in tokyo all you basically see and feel is designer lines, diets and so forth in osaka it was all flesh and corporeality. quite striking and interesting that first impression.

(like when i first visited tokyo while living in kansai the first thing that struck me was that, although osaka people may be more friendly, open and so forth, in tokyo i felt strangely 'normal', an ease I'd almost forgotten about, in kansai i was always subtly (made to be) feeling like a gaijin whereas in tokyo i could have been in sydney , new york or berlin.