Japan gets a lot of things very, very right. Waste disposal, transport, taxes, public service, food, restaurants and incredibly effective face wash: Japan nails them. The cities are clean, the crime is low, the countryside is beautiful and the past-times are genuinely entertaining. This is a country where themed 'Love Hotels' (paid for by the hour, anonymously) aren't seedy or embarrassing but romantic and fun; where drunken karaoke is weekly; where adults can read comics on commuter trains without shame; where fat, naked men push each other around a stage for public amusement. Christmas isn't even a holiday here, but Japan still has the best cookies, lights and generally festive twinkle-fluff I've ever seen; I've eaten the best pizza of my life in a country where it's nothing short of a novelty. If the world was a playground and the countries its children, then Japan would be the really irritating little kid that gets everything right in class, wins all the football medals and still manages to not get their head put down the toilet. (The UK would be the fat, spotty one following around whoever was the scariest that day: probably America.)
Nothing in Japan, however, is quite as right as the Onsen; a hot spring public bath. Because traditional customs in Japan are based on Shintoism, cleanliness is of utmost, sacred importance, and public bathing in hot mineral water is therefore an ancient and still fervently upheld Japanese custom. It is commonly thought that the hot minerals heal, restore, regenerate and cleanse, and the communal nature helps to create ties of harmony and peace between strangers, thus strengthening Japan as a whole.
Which was all very well and good, but my first accidental visit to an Onsen - four days after my arrival in Japan - led to me bursting into tears, weeping incoherently at the receptionist and then running out again. All I knew was that I'd gone for a swim and found myself in a room full of butt naked old women, scraping themselves down laconically with sponges and staring at me.
'W-w-was i-i-it a a a jjokke?' I sobbed down the phone to The Boy, sitting on my suitcase and weeping into my coat at Nagoya train station.
'Was what a joke?' he replied in confusion.
'Th-th-th-the place you sent me!' I cried. 'What was it?'
'An onsen?' he said in still more confusion.
'B-b-b-b-but they were all naked!' I choked, welling up again. 'Why? Why would you do that to me?'
'Oh baby,' he said after a good five minutes of laughter that cost me about 500 yen in phone bill; 'onsens are naked. That's the point of them. It didn't even occur to me that you didn't know that.'
'W-w-w-well, n-n-n-n-ow I d-d-do,' I stuttered, and caught the first train I could back to a place where people wore clothes and didn't manhandle their breasts in front of me.
Yesterday, in the spirit of positivity and harmony and 'embracing shit' - as my friend put it - I decided to try again, and I finally understood what the onsen is about. Always a fan of having my bath water too hot, five different mineral pools - one filled with ice cold black mud, and one with extremely hot black mud - did, indeed, relax, rejuvenate and cleanse; I wallowed like a happy little pig until my friend told me I'd gone purple and should probably get out before my head popped.
But it was more than that. The room was full of women of all ages, of all sizes: utterly, utterly naked, and utterly, utterly comfortable with that. Women of 90, children of 10: they wandered, they bathed, they chatted, they scrubbed, and they generally made themselves brand new again. With bathing costumes on it would have felt hedonistic, sordid, pointless, Western. Without them, it felt like a kind of rebirth. Something natural, and clean, and innocent. And yes, we got stared at, but after ten minutes the little old Japanese women were laughing with us at our squeaks in the cold mud, and chatting with us about... well, I don't know what they were chatting with us about, but it all seemed rather lovely.
Everybody needs a chance to start again: to strip away all the hard stuff, and the hurtful stuff, and the stuff that weighs them down, and put it in a locker, grab a towel and immerse themselves in something that will take it all away. And Japan - the country that somehow knows what it is you need before you know it yourself - has it already built into its ancient customs: the cleansing, purifying, harmonising experience of the Onsen.
Pink, glowing and utterly naked, I left the room full of unclothed strangers this time feeling calm, and clean, and ready to begin again.
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