Memories of Japan I

 This bathhouse is now in an architectural museum, but it is similar to the one in my neighborhood.  The designers/carpenters usually build shrines and temples, in addition to public bathhouses.

 There is a mural to give bathers the feeling of being in nature, and Mt Fuji is the most common subject.

Coffered ceiling in the dressing area

I arrived in Japan in March 1978, starting what would be 36 years living there.  I landed at Haneda, the main international airport at that time.  The ‘new’ airport at Narita was not finished yet.  Haneda is on the edge of Tokyo Bay, which was pretty industrial in those days.  I rode the monorail into town; the views from the train were mostly lots of gray concrete warehouses and faint fluorescent street lighting.  I arrived at Moto-Hasunuma station in Itabashi-ku.  That neighborhood also seemed pretty gray, especially at night.  There were some small retail shops lining a narrow street, but they were all closed for the night.  My friend Kate guided me to the rooming house where my room had been arranged.  It was a small two-story frame building with about five tiny rooms on each floor, and a toilet at the end of the hall—yes, a Japanese-style floor-level squat toilet.  The room was not without its charms—it was floored with tatami, 4.5 mats in fact (about nine by nine feet).  Kate loaned me some bedding (I ended up sleeping on the floor the whole time I lived in Japan).  The room had a 0.5-mat space devoted to a square stone basin with a cold-water tap and a space for a single gas burner.  The ceiling was made of wood planks arranged on lath-like stringers.  There was a single bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling.  The door to the room was a sliding panel fitted with a hasp for a padlock.  An English woman and a French man were living across the hall.  Another room was rented by an American, and there was a very cheerful elderly lady living next door to me.  The elderly lady just happened to leave a cooking pot and a cutting board in the trash soon after I arrived, allowing me to furnish my kitchen on the cheap.

Since I had arrived late in the evening, exhausted from an international flight, I went right to bed.  The next day, I was ready for a shower.  But, no bath in our building!  So I asked the French guy across the hall to take me to the public bath (it didn’t open until 4:00 PM) and explain the etiquette and procedures, etc.  It was only slightly traumatic—the female manager seemed curious about me, and dropped into the men’s bath (pretending that she needed to check the water temperature) just as I was sitting on the edge of the hot tub (very hot, so escaping by immersion was not an option).  Well, once your modesty is totally gone, things are easier.  And there was a lot I loved about that public bath.  It had large boulders built into the tub, so you could lean against the hot rocks for a heat ‘treatment.’ 

The building was owned by Mrs. Otsuki, whose single-family house was next to our building.  At that time, telephone sharing was a thing.  Of course, I am talking land-based, that is all there was.  It was very expensive to have a phone installed—it required a huge deposit, actually a bond issued by the phone company.   For what, I don’t know.  Anyway, it was quite common for people to call the next-door neighbor, who would go next door and bring the person to their home to talk on the phone.  My boss called me several times at Mrs. Otsuki’s house, so I becam rather familiar with her living room.  For my outgoing calls, I walked to the bank branch on the corner, which had a pay phone outside.  Those phones were operated by 10-yen coins.   For ten yen, you just got 90 seconds, I think, but you could put up to ten coins in the slot, to make longer calls.  Any unused coins would go in the coin return.  One day, I realized I had left 20 or 30 yen in the phone.  When I went back to the bank later in the afternoon, the coins were still there!

As I tried to familiarize myself with the takeout foods available in the neighborhood, one of my first discoveries was kappa maki.  It was a dish offered by a tiny, takeout-only sushi shop.  I was not very interested in ‘fishy’ sushi at that point, so I got the kappa maki.   The kappa is a mythical being said to live around rivers, and they are thought to love cucumber, maybe because of the wateriness.  The rice is rolled around cucumber spears and flavored with sesame seeds, and wrapped in laver sea vegetable sheets. I discovered a tiny bakery where they sold egg salad sandwiches made with their own bread, as well as twisted fried donuts dipped in sugar.  I got my own eggs from the neighborhood chicken-and-egg shop.  Out on the main street where the subway station was, there was a chain bento shop the sold cheap box lunches, just a few dollars for the cheap ones with salmon and sea greens.   I began to recognize some of these shopkeepers, and the barber who cut my hair, as patrons of the public bath.