Hi everyone, I know it’s been ridiculously long since my last blog post. I have ideas about different things I’d like to take more than 150 characters to think about, but then I feel guilty when I look at my study books and realize how much more Japanese there is to learn. Let me just sum up that part of my life by saying: Japanese is hard.
On other fronts: last month I took a road trip through one of Japan’s southern islands, Kyushu. Kyushu is just a hop and a skip away from Hiroshima, but all the expensive toll roads in Japan less enticing. A friend who has a car wanted to take advantage of relatively cheaper toll roads, which would be expiring soon and returning to higher rates. Plus, after a long cold winter and a long Golden Week vacation (when offices around the country are closed) it seemed like the right time to make our way to slightly warmer climes. It was a wonderful chance to see Japan by car–something I had never done before as I’m usually gazing from a train window instead. For the first time I saw the images most people think of when they think of Japan: tiled old-fashioned roofs, terraced rice paddies that come right up to the edge of the road, nothing but small houses and beautiful green landscapes for miles and miles, and so much ocean. The Japan that I live in is densely packed with varying shades of gray concrete apartments and offices buildings, telephone polls, the noise of public transportation, and bicycles. Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but the countryside was a nice break from urban living.
Two of my traveling partners are serious onsen lovers. Onsen means public bath, and here there are tons of small public bath houses featuring water from a surprising variety of naturally heated mineral springs. The bath houses are separated by gender, and range from extremely quiet (where maybe you are the only one there) to bustling. You go in nude after a good soapy rub down outside the water. As I learned, it’s rude to introduce anything other than skin into the water, even a hand towel needs to stay out of the bath. Because of my friends’ serious love, vacation for them means onsen, and so nearly every night during our trip we found a local place to try out. The traveling crew consisted of 2 guys and 2 girls, and often we were nearly the only ones there. When there were just the two of us, we chatted, but also spent some time quietly soaking up the heat and healthy minerals.
However, there were a couple of times when we went to busy onsens, we even had the good fortune to make a stop in Nagasaki to one of Japan’s largest public bath houses. Here I had the opportunity to learn more about the culture of onsen, the way women interact with one another when there’s nothing but skin between them, and to think a bit about what it means to live in a woman’s body.
Obviously, this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about what it means to be a woman. I remember vividly the day my first period started during middle school sometime between language arts and lunch. Even though the boobs had been arriving before this moment, marking my passage into some other life and generating looks from grown men that I knew weren’t quite right, I wasn’t prepared. Truthfully, in my humiliation at having a soiled skirt at school I felt betrayed by my body. Since then I’ve come to a kind of peace with the physical trials and tribulations of being born female. Maybe even sometimes I think it’s pretty cool (of course, those aren’t the times when I’m curled up in a ball reaching for a glass of water and ibuprofin as I ride out some cramps). But something that has always bothered me is the way that women in the United States are physically so visible in the public sphere–from Britney’s accidental full frontal to the carefully manicured limbs, breasts, and bellies of super skinny models–and yet women are so shrouded in invisibility in many other ways.
Essentially, I know what women are suppose to look like in order to be sexually desirable, but I don’t have a very accurate picture in my mind of what happens to women’s bodies over time: Enter the onsen. Here, there are women’s bodies from birth to death. Little ones just getting accustomed to walking on their own (and hopefully potty trained), prepubescent girls, teens, women in their 20s, mothers, and finally grandmas. I find the variety of the form itself fascinating. For example, different women carry their excess fat in different places–mine is the belly (the Gibson curse, I call it), but here in Japan the genetic trend is a flat belly and bigger hips and thighs. The trend is also skinny (though that is changing, and hopefully I’ll make time to blog about that later). Some women have longer limbs, shorter waists–you spend so much time looking at the figures of a particular kind of woman (super model), that it can be rather eye-opening to see how different we all are.
Perhaps it’s merely idealism, but it seemed to me that the onsen is an interesting space where women interact with one another outside the male gaze. The look here is frank, matter of fact, unsurprised, and between family members–loving. Little girls trail after older sisters and their mothers, unsure and figuring out the rules (I joined them in this). The young women are more confident, they come alone or with friends, maybe begrudgingly including a younger sister. One of my favorite moments came when two friends in their early twenties filled an old-fashioned wooden barrel with water and sat down in it together, the sides of their bodies coming together, their laughter spilling out as quickly as the water gushing onto the floor. Mothers often strike a balance between intimacy and encouraging independence. The onsen is about fellowship, but in the end it’s actually about a relationship with your own body, one you navigate in the presence of others.
Finally, I’d like to say a word about the grandmas–some still slender despite the sagging and standing tall, others bent and curved in ways you know must be painful, all of them quiet and contemplative even in the midst of more chatty younger girls and women. Their presence makes this something other than a pool-side adventure. At the slightest hint of splashing, moving too quickly, talking too loudly, the grandmas have a way of making you feel you’re intruding. The onsen is their place after all. They’ve spent decades here shedding their clothes, and perhaps momentarily, the expectations of being women FOR men. They’ve lived inside all the various incarnations of a woman’s body and soon they will become something other than body. They’ve endured the hopes and betrayals that come with the territory of being born with two X chromosomes, and in the slow and steady movement towards the end you can feel their pleasure at having this one moment to do nothing other than indulge the vessel that has changed so much since that day they first came screaming into this world.
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