Inside the House (家の中/ie no naka)

In traditional Japanese farmhouses, there is a huge earthen-floored porch where you could work without taking off your shoes. This porch has shrunken in most modern houses to a tiny genkan, which is simply a place to leave your shoes before you step up a step to the shoeless interior. I was prepared for this custom, since many of our Japanese friends in Auckland had “no-shoes in the house” practice. This didn’t spare me from the occasional indignity of having it politely pointed out that I was wandering around the house still wearing my clodhoppers. But mistakes like that were more slips than cultural ignorance.
Usually, there would be slippers to keep your stockinged feet warm inside the house. There is another gradation within the house that took some time to get used to: in the tatami rooms, not even slippers are allowed. To walk on tatami in slippers would be like walking on a bed with slippers, since people often lie directly on the tatami, the way New Zealanders would lie on a bed for a rest.

Outside the house, if you are wandering around the garden, or if the ground is muddy, the traditional footwear is still the geta, the wooden “jandals” with a couple of strips of wood attached to the sole, to keep you out of the mud.

In my second week in Japan, when we were visiting friends in Shizuoka, I managed to commit the mortal sin of footwear transgressions: I walked into the house, ascended the stairs, and penetrated the sanctum sanctorum of the tatami room, all while still wearing my wooden geta.

Bathroom

The bathroom is another difficult zone for foreigners. When we arrived at the Gs’, Y carefully explained to me the proper procedure for having a bath in a Japanese house. The main thing to remember is that the bath itself is not for washing, but for soaking. The actual washing of the body is done outside the bath on the tiled area beside the bath. The dressing and undressing is done in a little ante-room. Once inside the bathroom, one starts a series of alternating bouts of washing and soaking, which can go on for what seems an extraordinarily long time for those whose culture teaches that bathing is a necessary chore, rather than the most sublime of pleasures.
The first wash is pretty perfunctory, with little more than a quick splash to the hot zones--the nether regions and perhaps the armpits. Then, into the tub for a few minutes to relax. Out again, and then some serious washing and shampooing. Al the soap is carefully rinsed off before a further period of immersion. Out again perhaps for a rinse of cool water to clear the head, and back in again. I would seldom get to that point, at least if I was on my own. During the whole exercise, it is extremely important, as Y emphasised to me, to ensure that not the slightest suspicion of soap should penetrate the pristine water in the tub.

I tried to absorb all this, managed the preliminary wash and then, just before I got into the tub, nonchalantly, and innocently, tossed the bar of soap into the water. There was just too much to absorb at one wash.

Over the years though, I began to acquire the instinctive revulsion at the prospect of mixing suds and bathwater. So, I was able to sympathise with both sides of the cultural equation when, some years later, we were at a theatre festival in a mountain valley in Toyama, in the north of Honshu.

We were walking past a bed and breakfast place, when we heard wails of disbelief and outrage emerging from inside: “He’s put soap in the bath! The foreigner has put soap in the bath!” In most hotels, that wouldn’t matter, as the bath would be for just one or two people. In the minshuku (guesthouse, similar to a bed and breakfast) though, the bath is communal, to be used by all the guests: one batch of bathwater has to last a number of people.

It’s easy for non-Japanese to feel a bit hygienically challenged by the Japanese love of bathing, and the insistence that the water be kept unsullied. It is some consolation though to realize that this is the result of the sharing of bath water and that Japanese people are quite happy to wash and shampoo in the bath if they are to be the only ones using the water. ( I should say that I am saying this on the basis of a sample of one, so I can’t be sure. )

So far I’ve been talking only about the domestic bath but the house bath is quite a modern amenity. Most urban Japanese families got a television before they got a bath in the house. In fact, the local neighbourhood bathhouse was an integral part of neighbourhood social life, and has only disappeared during the past couple of decades. Within a five hundred yard radius of our house in Shin-oo-e, there were three public bathhouses. The last closed three years ago. I did little to help them stay alive, usually going to bathhouses only when we were travelling to other cities.
Inside the entrance to a bathhouse, there would usually be a woman collecting money in front of a couple of curtains: one with the ideogram for woman “女”, and the other with “男”(male). The curtains only partially screen the interior, and one catches a glimpse of that pre-Meiji indifference to showing one’s body in public, even to the opposite sex.

These days (2002),in place of the old, functional bathhouses, a newer, glitzier, variety of “bath entertainment centres” have sprung up, which provides an upmarket venue, where a family can bathe and be entertained.