Leaving the Bathhouse (scattered thoughts, scenes from the bathhouse / only notes, toward an essay never to be written)
[Adapting Barthes (“Leaving the Movie Theater").] [(The only place in the city in which to actually practice) meditation.] There is something to confess: I like to leave a bathhouse. Back out on the more or less empty streets, the chill has gone out of the day. The wind no longer feels as cold. I walk in silence, my mind clear and, after the meditation of the bath, open to the city. I feel my body moving with new efficiency, muscles loose and warm, and all inflammation scorched out of my joints. This effect is not as powerful, certainly, if one is forced to attend the baths daily, but if I visit only once a week or so, its potency is preserved. ▭ Most of us do not look for a dramatic second baptism, dunked in the water in some exurban stream, but this might mimic a part of it. We are born and reborn in water. ▭ This is how the linga feels after it is bathed with milk, let’s say. □
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[Definition.] [I will return to this, but it is necessary for the scenes below to understand why I have included them and not, say, a public swimming pool or a hot spring resort.] This is the ideal bathhouse. It is free or nearly free to enter. It requires nudity. There is no opportunity for individual segregation. There is hot water.
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[Bathing scene #1.] [This meditation will give way to deeper things.] There are two communal retreats that are open to you and nearly everyone else in Tokyo. There is the kissaten, where a cup of coffee bought for pocket change is an invitation to sit as long as you wish. This is not ideal. We retreat from the city to make a connection with other people. We want to retreat from the sensation that we are nothing more than spooks, floating through the world. And so, I recommend the bathhouse, entry to which costs less, usually, than the cheapest item on a kissaten menu. The bathhouse offers complete liberation from the city. You must return to your body, here, because there is nothing left. ▭ Enter through the curtain marked with the character for your gender: 男. Undress under the mute television set showing a baseball game. Take a plastic stool and a basin, and sit under the mural of Fuji. There is a peculiar moment, when you have shed your clothing but have not yet begun to participate in the activities of the bath. This is the time when you feel truly naked. ▭ Fill the basin with water from the hot and cold taps, and dump them over your head. Move to the baths and find your place. ▭ Is there conversation? Maybe. Older men would like to talk. Unlike in the kissaten, you do not need to worry about disturbing them, or about keeping your voice down. ▭ Glance up. Watch the men at work on themselves at the taps, scrubbing soap into their underarms. Watch the men coming and going in front of the bath. This is an opportunity, maybe the only one in adult life, the only one free of the anxiety of youth, to be naked in a room with other men. This shifts the mind into primal thinking. The senses become sharper, but there is no fear. ▭ Get up and look in the mirror. ▭ Walk back into the city. □
[Bathing scene #2.] [When is the last time that you have felt your body?] At Kanda-yu in Arawaka Ward, only a few blocks down the Toden from where I first lived in the city in a grim sharehouse, they had a pool with electric current running through it. This was safe, and it must have only been a gimmick. I was too scared to enter. At Kotobukiyu in Taito Ward, there is a bath so hot that it is painful to enter. It makes your entire body tingle, as if you have received an electric shock. You can walk outside to the cold pool and dunk yourself in. It feels as if your heart has stopped. □
[Bathing scene #3.] [Although we might be divided, based on the extra amenities requested, the baths were egalitarian.] I lived there in spring and summer but I can only remember the winter in Pao'ai Number Eight Residential District. I rented a room in a building on whose bricks still showed faintly the painted slogans of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The city burned coal to keep us warm, but the radiators only remained warm for a few hours. The solar water heater stopped working. Most afternoons, I took the empty grinding Number 38 to Dynamic Park and went to the bathhouse with M■■■. I never knew for sure, but it may have once been a public utility. It was basic, and it was cheap enough that it still served those that had not yet upgraded to an apartment in the nearby blocks of gated towers. They came with their plastic baskets of toiletries under their arms and paid the basic fee, which included use only of the baths. There were showers and three pools, one lukewarm, one warm, another steaming. A television stood on a shelf in the corner. ▭ The owners were aware that they should compete also with the nearby spas. The giggling young men in shiny purple vests in the locker room were part of the sheen of luxury. The reclining vinyl chairs on the other side of the baths were part of this, too. And you could request of the young woman working the front counter a massage, which meant being called from those vinyl chairs into a backroom. ▭ M■■■ and I shaved in the mirrors with cheap disposable razors provided by the attendants. We knew to slip them a gratuity or a few cigarettes before our possessions went into the locker. While M■■■ stood under the hot shower, I would sit in the warm pool in the central room. The same men seemed always to be present. They watched my body with curiosity as I eased into the bath. The young attendants brought them cigarettes and changed the channel on the television set. There were dirty jokes. There was talk about politics in foreign countries. □
[Bathing scene #4.] [Warm water is all that it takes.] I am in Shenzhen in this scene. This is near Luohu. In an alley watched over day and night by older women touting for the flop houses and brothels on the floors above, I took a room in a hotel with a neon sign. The room contained a bed and a lamp. The doors were made of particle board and were secured upon leaving with a padlock. The man at the desk could not imagine why I would want to pay him a modest bribe to stay there, and I did not explain to him that unless I convinced X■■■■■ to send me a Western Union transfer and found a branch of the Agricultural Bank to receive it, I would run out of money by the end of the week. ▭ Down a separate hall, through an opening between two buildings, the hotel’s owner ran a shower room. It was free for those staying in the rooms but was patronized also by guests from outside, who paid a small fee to use it. Off of a changing room with a bench and a few lockers, there was a tiled room with ten shower heads mounted high on the wall. A massage table took up the rest of the room. Since I had nothing better to do but wait, I spent hours at a time in the shower room. Other men staying in the rooms did the same. This was a cheap way to waste time. It was the only communal space we had. They talked about their business and I answered questions about myself and my world. They gave each other massages on the table. We drifted from the showers to the bench. When I checked into the Petrel a few days later, I gave the manager the second half of my promised bribe and took a final shower. □
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[Sketchy idea #1.] [What does the bathhouse provide?] I am sure that it is physically and mentally healthier to bathe in public. There must be studies on this. I am so sure of this fact that I will not bother to look them up. ▭ The bathhouse must provide something else, though. I think I have gestured at an idea already, talking about the egalitarianism of the baths, the possibility for disconnection from the city… There is an idea—heterotopia—sketched by Michel Foucault and abused for all sorts of purposes… It is one those places that, although it must necessarily geographically remain within the world beyond its walls, allows liberation from a wider social context. He takes the baths of the Muslim world as an example (he was, I imagine, most familiar with the hammam, but there is no reason not to use the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. baths as an example, since they function about the same way, as far as I know). In the bathhouse, rules about modesty and conduct observed in the wider world can be ignored, and with the shedding of clothes there is an unusual egalitarianism possible. ▭ It occurs to me that the examples he gives of hetertopias are places that essentially no longer exist. The asylums have been emptied. Brothels were replaced by the darker corners of internet platforms. The festivals he is describing are not the festivals we might attend now. The bathhouse, returning to the context of East Asia, was uprooted by the market. What was originally a public or semi-public utility was replaced with private spaces, in the sense of being privately owned and also in that they were not communal. ▭ In most of the world, the functions of the bathhouse have been replaced by the bathroom (and not, as we see in Shower, Zhang Yang’s film about the demolition of a community bath, by the automated individual shower box on the street). The Chinese bathing center, the urban onsen, the suburban Korean spa (in Korea or the United States) do not count as a revival but a perversion. □
[Sketchy idea #2.] [The bathroom was a mistake.] [Henri Lefebvre: Who invented the bathroom? When did its use begin to spread? With the bourgeoisie. In the Christian West, the lengthy decline of public baths prepared the way for its adoption.] In his quest for historical examples of an architecture of enjoyment, Lefebvre comes closest to satisfying himself on a fantasy tour through the Baths of Diocletian. He describes the vaulted halls, the palaestrae, the massage rooms, the library, and finally the immense open-air pool. The Baths of Diocletian, too, are unlike the bathing center or the spa of present, even if they might aspire to that level of luxury, since nobody, from slave to emperor, was excluded. These were a public good. ▭ We can have our own definition of enjoyment. The bathhouse must fit within it. □
[Sketchy idea #3.] In Zhang Jingsheng Methods for Organizing a Beautiful Society, written in 1925, he says that the first order of business in his ideal state would be the construction of bathhouses. These must be secular temples to aesthetic perfection. They will be beautiful and vast, and, like the Baths of Diocletian, include gymnasiums and library. Their purpose is not only hygiene, which could be taken care of in even the meanest accommodations tolerated in a modern city, but aesthetic inspiration. ▭ All utopian thinking should start from the bathhouse. □
[Sketchy idea #4.] Sharing his experience in Japan, Zhang Jingsheng says that mixed-gender nude bathing is a necessary ingredient. It promotes healthy development of the sexual organs and healthy desire, he says. He believes it to be part of the reason that Japan had successfully modernized. I am not convinced. In my definition above, I could have included gender segregation. The bathhouse provides, even in these East Asian contexts, where gender politics are perhaps not as progressive, one of the few places for men to be alone with men. This is important.
[What is outside the definition.] I have noticed that most of the scenes I wrote and definitions I ventured are about places in East Asia. It is true that there is communal bathing, but none takes place in what would fit my narrow definition of a bathhouse. ▭ There are public swimming pools. ▭ I could tell you about the Natatorium, where my great-grandmother swam and where I swam, decades apart. The Natatorium, when I first went there, was already nearly a hundred years old. It had been in my great-grandmother’s time, having been built to resemble the swimming pools of Paris, a symbol of modernity in a small town. A relief project offered as a public good, it was a symbol of the largesse of the powerful. ▭ It was, in a sense, the last physical evidence of a lost age. The town had no shortage of old buildings, but most had been put to other purposes or torn down. Not too far away, on River Street, the handsome hotels that formerly served Canadian Pacific Railway travelers were turned into cheap booze joints. The Canadian Pacific Railway train station became a liquor store. The Canadian National Railway station became a day spa. The train stopped running. The Natatorium was still used for its intended purpose. ▭ I swam there in the summer, when school was out. I spent most of my time lying on the grass beside the outdoor pool. ▭ It was too expensive to keep open. It was replaced by an addition to the Kinsmen Arena off MacDonald Street, which is a municipal facility that looks like any other in the country. ▭ But doesn’t a public swimming pool, even if it is in a grim structure, allow what could fit within the loosest definition of communal bathing? It is too structured. The water is not hot enough. ▭ I could talk about hot springs in the mountains. ▭ I took A■■■■ to the hot springs because she saw them on the map, and, I realize now, many years later, expected them to be surrounded by the atmosphere of an onsen town. We stopped first at a pool on the highway up to Jasper. She put on the black bikini she had bought the day before at a gift shop in Banff. ▭ There was a strong wind blowing down from the ridge. There were no trees to shelter the wide concrete pool. We watched a tour bus slowly empty in the parking lot. Elderly Europeans in crisp plastic jackets and wool scarves and hiking boots filed off, carrying canes and cameras. We watched them a short time later walk out of the locker rooms and down the ramp into the hot pool. The men wore long swim trunks that they pulled up high over their pale white bellies. The women wore black or dark blue one-piece bathing suits. ▭ This does not fit my definition. ▭ The next afternoon, at a motel in Jasper, we found on a map, at the end of a long logging road, an undeveloped hot spring. We drove most of the morning to get there. We found it between the dusty road and a bright blue river. Nobody was around. We soaked our feet and drove back. ▭ This does not fit my definition. The place must have a roof. ▭ I could mention beaches, especially at lakes on the Prairies. The water is not warm, though, and, again, there is no roof, and nudity is discouraged. ▭ Well. It occurs to me that I am ignoring what most people think of when they hear about bathhouses, which would be, basically, saunas that tolerate gay sex. These come closest to my narrow definition, especially if gender segregation is included. ▭ Well. Gay bathhouses aside, nothing seems to fit my definition. Is there, then, something essentially Asian about communal bathing of this sort? I don’t think so. There are dull historical-material explanations. □