Three Hours in an Onsen: My Excursion into Legal Public Nudity

Before I got to Japan, the last person I was naked in front of besides my boyfriend was my gynecologist (and that wasn’t total nudity, since I had one of those flimsy little pink robes). Even then, I tucked my underwear into my shoes on the floor so the doctor who was about to look deep into my vagina couldn’t possibly see them. That would’ve been embarrassing. This biannual twenty minutes with Dr. Adie was a month’s worth of preemptive anxiety, not only for the cancer screening, but for the fact I was going to be completely exposed in front of a stranger with their eyes on me. So, when dropped in a country where they have a spiritual and social commitment to bathing, it took me six months to work up the courage to get naked. I needed to partake in the magical experience of public nudity, and that meant diving into a sento or an onsen.

Most towns in Japan have a sento: a local public bathhouse with shower stalls and a collective tub shared by all members of the community. Children, elders, business folk, parents, singles, couples—you name it and you can find them. Like an onsen, it’s separated by sex (unfortunate for those whose gender doesn’t align with their body parts) and serves as a gossip hub for local families. My town’s sento is a cigarette box building with a fake thatched roof about a twenty-minute walk from my apartment, but if I had a car, it would be quicker than running my own bath at home. An onsen shares most of the same characteristics as a sento, with the separation and the publicity and all, but onsen utilizes fresh hot spring water from the natural pools around Japan. Both sento and onsen are hot to the touch, but only onsen is nutrient-rich water that heals and smooths skin unlike any commercial product (I read that on a sign somewhere). The act of communal bathing once celebrated the end of rice harvest season, when all the stress from long hours hunched over in muddy troughs could be melted into the steamy waters.

Now, I could’ve gone to my local sento to bare it all, but then I remembered something vital: I taught middle school students. The idea of seeing one of the girls, naked, washing their hair like nothing’s wrong, talking about the English test while we’re both sitting in the same bath…just, no thank you. I vetoed that idea immediately and chose to go as far as I could afford, which though it was only a forty-minute train ride to the north, I didn’t run into a single student of mine. And the one I found in Morioka had both sento and onsen on the property. Win-win!

Until I walked through the curtain into the women’s side and locked eyes with a twelve-year-old. 

I shot my eyes to the ceiling. I thought I was sparing her shame, like I’d walked in on her in the bath (a phrase that is only good in an American context, I realize) and she needed a minute to scramble for something to cover herself with. But she stood there, a pink towel wrapped around her hair, a bar of soap in her hand, an eyebrow raised before she wandered off towards the bathhouse. Another woman walked by me, nipples sprung a good half-inch off her breasts. A toddler, presumably hers, slapped wet footprints on the black floor and took delight in the quick evaporation of it. Slap, giggle. Slap, giggle.  In one of the mirrors on the warm wood wall, an old woman with grey hair raised her leg against the counter and dried her pubic area with a hairdryer like a roman statue. I looked at them. They looked at me. We all looked away. The lady continued to blow dry herself though.

And nothing was happening. I stood at my locker, fake fiddling with the lock, waiting for someone to tell me when and how to strip. Did I just start? I looked around the corners for a changing room or secluded corner, but I found another woman in just her underwear with a toothbrush hanging out of her mouth. Were people looking at me? I was white, obviously a foreigner, still dressed and visibly concerned. But were they looking at me because I was white or because I was still dressed after standing there for a full five minutes? Were they going to look at me more when I stripped? Thick and pale, acne scars, cellulite, stretch marks, weirdly shaped toes, a belly pouch, big boobs, an odd spectacle for the masses on this quaint Saturday morning? I looked around the corner, behind me, beside me, and no one stopped me. I slid out of my sweater dress (as this was the dead of winter), tied my hair in a beansprout on the top of my head (as I read online that hair in the communal bath was taboo), and made to the sliding door into the bathhouse before I realized I still had my mask on (as this was Covid times). After a quick once-around the room, both to discard my mask with my clothes and work up some confidence, covering myself with my arms, I returned to the door and entered the sacred colony of tranquil cleanliness.

Sitting in a hot bath with a handful of other women, in joined and accepted silence, I was officially the least sexualized human being on the planet. As a teenager in America, it always felt like I was meant to be sexual, and if I wasn’t, I was doing this whole feminine thing wrong. But in turn, sex meant shame and shame meant modesty. I never wore a skirt above my knees, thought makeup besides mascara was for whores, and prided myself on my virginity as a sense of worth. I don’t even know who taught me this. I didn’t go to Catholic school or anything either. The constant visuals of women in underwear, going alone into public bathrooms, offhanded comments about unmarried cousins with kids, sweating in pants during the spring because the shorts in the girls’ section of Target were too short, they all just fused to me without me knowing it. But not here. The urge to cover my breasts slowly waned as the water loosened my body, my legs untucked and floating leisurely ahead of me. No eyes, no comparisons, no expectations of shame over our bodies. We women just shared our solitude protected by thick wooden fences and the grey snowy sky. The Japanese language has a term for this: Hadaka no Tsukiai, naked friendship. 

I perused bath to bath, testing every option with a newfound excitement for being alive: 40C, 45C, carbonated, lavender scented, 50C (which felt like my skin was on fire, but the old lady neck-deep in the tub seemed just fine), standing spritz baths, lounging baths, single cup baths, green tea. I bounced from room to room, outdoors and indoors, completely forgetting the fact I was nude for most of it. At one point towards the end of my trip, I stood on the heated outdoor floor between two baths and embraced the icy winds dipping in over the fence. It was a comfortable icy edge to my skin, but my chest was so warm from the bath that I could’ve stood there for hours. 

I was not inherently sexual. I wasn’t dirty or vain or a product to eye. I was just a person with a body, surrounded by other people with bodies, cleansed in the water of a natural hot spring like nature intended. 

Only problem: nature didn’t have towels, and neither did I. I forgot to bring one. 

Leah Skay is an author and teacher from a nowhere town in Delaware, but currently lives in a nowhere town in Japan as an English Language teacher with the Japanese Exchange and Teaching program. She has found homes for her work in Iron Horse Literary Review, Stillwater Magazine, and Hoxie Gorge Review.