Japanese view of Korean baths

EVERYONE KNOWS that public baths and spas have always been a distinctive part of Japanese daily life and culture, but not as many are aware that public baths are also an important part of Korean culture. That’s why I was intrigued when I spotted an article in my local paper profiling traditional Korean bathhouses, or mogyoktang, for a Japanese audience.

It’s one thing when Western journalists with no experience in a public bathing culture giggle their way through an article about Asian baths, but it’s quite another when one veteran views another veteran from a slightly different tradition. The article wasn’t in English, and it’s not on-line, so I’ve summarized it here.

Fujii Michihiko, the South Korean correspondent for the Nishinippon Shimbun, starts by comparing mogyoktang to a Japanese sento. He laments the disappearance of the old-fashioned establishments that are now being replaced by more modern bathhouses, a trend that mirrors the same phenomenon in Japan.

Even though Fujii grew up with the public bath tradition, he still experienced a bit of culture shock on his initial exposure to the Korean baths, calling them “wild” (wairudo) places. What he considers wild sheds a bit of unintended light on both cultures.

First, he was startled by the loud gargling noises of the guys sitting next to him. The Japanese language is known for its use of onomatopoeia, and Fujii dips into this rich lexicon to render these sounds as “gara-gara” and “pett”. He also was taken aback when the attendant exfoliating him (akasuri) dumped the gunk he scraped off his customer’s body into a pile right in front of his face.

What most surprised the reporter, however, was that Koreans “both male and female” strut around the bath giving everyone an unobstructed view of posterior and anterior alike. He says that at first he followed the custom of some Japanese by using a small, strategically placed towel, but that brought funny looks from the other Korean bathers, accompanied by an expression that suggested, “What’s the big secret?”

While Fujii states that Japanese would use a towel, perhaps it might be more accurate to say that’s a Kyushu custom. Some of the men—though by no means all—in a Kyushu sento mince around as if they were junior high school girls, covering their crotch with a washcloth. I too wondered what the big (or little) secret was when I first saw them.

That’s certainly not what I saw on my single visit to a Tokyo sento, and the lack of prudery among Tokyoites has also been confirmed by Japanese friends. One young Kyushu woman told me she was taken aback at the bathhouse brazenness of females in the capital, and demonstrated their bold behavior by striding across the room with her chest stuck out. (Yes, it did appeal to my prurient interests.)

Fujii boasts a little on his own behalf, saying he no longer needs a fig leaf to cover himself in a Korean bath, though he still averts his eyes when he sees someone “with a good physique” lying on a cot.

You draw your own conclusions from that one, and I’ll draw mine.

Unlike Japanese baths, today’s South Korean saunas often have barbers, and he marvels at the Greco-Roman tableau of naked men getting a haircut, naked men reading magazines while waiting their turn, and a naked Japanese journalist fascinated by it all, perhaps peeking through his fingers.

The author finds it curious that despite letting it all hang out in the baths, Korean men tend to avoid stripping to the waist in public, even during the dog days of summer, and they never bare their butts. He attributes this to the influence of Confucianism.

The Japanese have always been blasé about the body and its functions in public. For example, in Kyushu, the dress of both men and women can be very skimpy in summer to cope with the intense heat. Japanese sumo wrestlers wear a loincloth, called a mawashi, which exposes the buttocks when they compete. This is broadcast live on national television. Men participating in public festivals wear similar loincloths, even in frigid temperatures.

Fujii asked a Korean friend about this contrast in Korean behavior in the bath and in the streets, and this is what he was told: Koreans are even more conscious of status and rank than Japanese, and removing all one’s clothes—signs of status and rank–puts everyone on an equal footing. Politicians and the voting public, company presidents and corporate drones…everyone becomes the same in the bath.

Afterwords:

The underlying Chinese characters of the Korean word mogyoktang would be read mokuyokuto in Japanese, who don’t use them in this combination. The “to” is the same “to” in sento, the traditional Japanese baths. It means hot water.

The Japanese do use the word mokuyoku, however, which means to wash. My wife tells me she most often hears it used to refer to washing babies in a small tub. The use of the different words for the same facility highlights another interesting difference. Mention a sento to a Japanese, and they’ll think of soaking in the bath water rather than washing. The word mokuyoku from mogyoktang, however, would shift the emphasis for them from soaking to scrubbing.

The mogyoktang are/were immediately recognizable on the street by their chimneys, as you can see from the accompanying photo. In Japan, chimneys of that sort call to mind the traditional kilns for making ceramics. That might be because I live so close to Arita, however.

Here is a Japanese page with photographs showing the public signs for Korean baths at different facilities. (The second sign reads “Paradise Motel”, and we can all draw our own conclusions about that one, too.) These public signs usually have a symbol with three vertical wavy lines. The Japanese use those same symbols, but never for baths—only for natural hot springs. That’s probably a colonial period legacy that has now taken on a different meaning in South Korea.

For those who aren’t ready to towel off yet, here’s an account in English of a trip to a Korean-style bath in the US.