got onsen
A new onsen has been built in the village where I live, which will no doubt afford me the opportunity to see many more people I know from work and everyday life completely and HORRIBLY naked.
An onsen is an alien thing to someone from the UK. Explaining the premise behind an onsen to friends from back home caused shrieks of concern for my already questionable heterosexuality. On the other hand, talking about them to a friend from a cleaner, more civilised European country (which can mean anywhere except France) reaped the response, “oh, you mean a spa?”. Of course, the fact that this friend IS homosexual will be taken as a mutually exclusive circumstance.
Lets take a look at the onsen routine:
When you enter the onsen room you will be naked except for a small face towel they will have given you. The first thing you will be expected to do is clean the rabies off you at one of the provided cleaning ’stations’, which is usually a rather unglamorous row of small plastic seats. When I say ’small’ however, I’m not really doing justice to the sphincter-entering minuteness of these tiny plastic nubs, which are probably in gross violation of several international human rights laws. They are barely ankle-height and require you to actually topple yourself off-balance from a squatting position to smash your arse down onto them, the resultant breadth of cheek spreadage meaning that there are parts of your body touching something where you really DON’T want the same part of someone elses body to have been just moments before.
However, as bad as they are, you have to pray to the onsen gods that there will be one free when you walk in. If there are no seats free, you will have to mince around waiting awkwardly, very much exactly like a person would standing naked in a room full of people whilst having no immediate task to carry out, occasionally making eye contact with someone who has just looked up from glancing at your penis.
Taking care to make sure you don’t finish washing before someone who was already sitting down - which would highlight you as the FILTHY animal that you are - you scrub all parts of your body with the small towel that was given to you and use the available cheap bulk-buy soap which is worryingly identical in appearance and scent to the cheap bulk-buy shampoo and cheap bulk-buy face and toe wash. Yes I made that last one up. Its face and BUM wash.
After washing, you throw a bucket of water over yourself for a final rinse and are now ready to enter the onsen. It is common practise after this point to then enter the water, proudly place the small towel on your head, expunge a satisfied grunt from your lungs and close your eyes.
Looking around you cannot find a single crack in the wall that will allow you to peer through to the womens section. Sometimes I feel like rallying up the men who are present to form a kind of wall-crushing army of naked doom, but everyone always looks completely zoned out or too busy doing some kind of thrusting exercise to want to bother to help me in my crusade.
