Explore everyday life in Japan
Fireplaces and chimneys are rare in Japan. So if you happen to see a tall chimney sticking out between buildings or poking out above the tiled rooftops of houses while walking through the older residential areas of Japanese towns and cities, chances are, you have a found a neighborhood sentou, or bathhouse.
While newer sentou can be quite large and popular, often having a combination of indoor and outdoor baths, a sauna, a dining area, and massage rooms, the older sentou that are still tucked into the folds of old neighborhoods, tend to be quite small and simple. They often have two very similar rooms (one for men and the other for women), both of which have a wall of showers and a communal bathing pool that is built against the back wall of the sentou (in western Japan, these sentou are more likely to have the bathing pool in the middle of the room).
If you walk past an old sentou in the evening, you may find two or three elderly men or women standing just outside the entrance of the sentou talking. One or more of them may be standing over a walker. Or, perhaps, one or more of them will be bent over nearly double, holding themselves up with the help of a cane. You may even see an elderly person passing by on a bicycle with a cloth bag that has pajamas and a towel in it bouncing around in the bike’s front basket. Or, you may only find a few pairs of shoes neatly lined up at the entranceway, often with their toes pointing outward away from the lockers that are built into the wall of the sentou's foyer.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.