Covid accelerated a decline but a new breed of bathhouse is reimagining a Japanese tradition
, an old bathhouse in northern Tokyo, and turned an abandoned Edo-style row house next door into a space where squeaky clean bathers come to read, have a drink and a snack or take a nap on its tatami-mat floors.
Inari-yu now attracts 100-200 people a day – a mixture of veterans and younger people – who together bring in just enough income to keep it afloat., but make it welcoming for regulars and new people alike,” said Holden, who has visited about 200since first encountering them as a graduate student in Tokyo. “You come across a whole section of the population here – men and women, young and old, foreigners and people from different walks of life.“They are somewhere to ground yourself in the city.
After the coronavirus pandemic hastened the demise of even more bathhouses, those that survived now have to contend with the soaring fuel prices, which forced authorities in Tokyo to raise admission for adults by ¥20 to ¥500 in July. The many challenges have not deterred Sanjiro Minato, who quit his “boring” job as a salaryman and took over the running of the Ume-yu bathhouse in Kyoto in 2015.when I was a university student and I was bothered by the fact that they were in decline,” said Minato, who attracted new customers with concerts and flea markets, and promotes, most of his customers were older people; now more than half are in their 20s and 30s.
“Westerners don’t think of a bath in the same way as the Japanese do,” added Machida, who has visited 3,800 bathhouses over the past 40 years. “They think of them as functional, but in Japan a bath has another, equally important role as somewhere to mentally and physically unwind. Bathing in a
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