Public Baths¶
Going to American baths is just so weird. I spent my summer in Japan visiting different onsens, and it was both a natural and spiritual experience. Before entering the water, everyone would bathe in the front, and kids would learn from their dads how to bathe. I would often sit on the edges of cliffs, gazing at the water or the sunrise, and it felt like we were monkeys, freely splashing about in nature.
In contrast, the time I spent in LA or New York City at various bathhouses was different. No one looked like an animal; instead, everyone seemed focused on optimization. People barely bathed before entering the water, wearing their dirty little speedos and swim trunks that they had definitely peed in the month before.
Gross.
American Zoos¶
Thankfully the first time I ever bathed naked in a bath house was in Koreatown, LA. I'd never grown up doing sports and so I thought the idea of taking all your clothes off in a bunch of dudes was so, so strange. Luckily everything was fine and funny enough it was the first time in my life I realized that I had a really reasonable body.
But when I moved to New York City and started going to the bathhouses in Brooklyn, everything felt weird. It was like a nightclub. Everyone's body felt like it was made to be looked at and not enjoyed. And it honestly left me pretty confused. People had stopwatches to figure out how long they could stay in ice baths and then would cycle some kind of 40 minute program and sauna and cold plunge. Everything was something to be optimized. Something to be looked at by someone else.
I feel like I've always seen a bathhouse as a place to get together and relax and rest and release the cumulative work that we've all collected as a group of people. The group works together and relax together. But when I look at American bath houses, it just feels like more work...
The worst part too, because you don't trust anybody to shower, everything small is a little bit chlorinated especially when people are wearing their nasty swimsuits.
Onsen¶
Outside of my experience in the Korea town bathhouse, most of the time I have been spent was in American ones where the public bathing was against too optimized and felt more like work and recovery rather than relaxation.
I want to contrast this with my time in Japan where the hotels I visited all had an onsen in one sense or another. It would be something that we go to after we travel in order to relax and recover from the flight or the train ride or the walk over. We are all expected to bathe and sit down and look in a mirror and clean ourselves. And we see the elders teaching the children how to maintain their hygiene and the ritual of the bath house.
And we would just get in the water and be outside and feel the wind and listen to the trees and birds and insects of the summertime. In the onsen, there was a collective calm, that makes it a place where you can go and write poetry about the appreciation of nature. Afterward, they would give you a cold little milk and you could go downstairs and grab a bowl of curry or udon instead.
Honestly I have no goal for writing this article. I just feel like every time I go to an American bath house I feel so so strange. I just think it's so interesting that even at 27 when I went to it on send I watched some of all people behave and they straight up put me on new game. Whereas, TikTok in America, girls are asking guys if people ever watched their asses...
Americans are so weird.