Japan has had a culture of bathing in public baths and natural volcanic hot springs for centuries, and I’ve really become an aficionado of this great aspect of the country since my arrival in 1991. Everywhere I drive, I’ve got my “bath kit” in the car with me, so I can stop at any roadside hot springs and get clean. One of the more famous images of Japan is male-female “mixed bathing” (called kon’yoku), although I have some bad news for would be mixed bathers — it’s almost impossible to find these baths anymore. As Japanese society has evolved to become more Western, the idea of men and women bathing together has faded, and in all my journeying I only managed to find one official mixed bath. This doesn’t mean that men bathing in a public bath need go without females around them, however. For some odd reason, it’s perfectly normal for the cleaning lady in these baths to enter when the men are washing themselves, to tidy the buckets or check the temperature of the water, and no one thinks anything of it here.
Sadly, mixed bathing is a lost art in Japan outside of anime comic-relief stories.
