この記事を取材したのは、ニュージーランド生まれのカメロン・マッキーンと、編集長ルーカス。「僕も日本が好きになってここにいるけど、日本の良いところを忘れないように見せていきたいなと思ってる」というルーカスの言葉のように、外国人の視点を持って見つめた写真と文章には、新しいペーパースカイのコンセプトが込められている。

Tokyo has cleverly disguised it’s Sento as lavish temples and the only evidence of their true identity, and the naked bathing inside, comes from the steam rising above the tiled rooftops and the chrome smokestack. However, careful eyes can pick them out by the “hafu,” a curved wooden shape hanging over the entrance. “It symbolizes an entrance to paradise,” says Sento writer Shinobu Machida. There are only three other places where you can see such a shape: at the entrance to a temple, on a funeral car and outside a soapland (brothel).”

Machida began investigating Sento when he couldn’t explain to a foreign friend why Tokyo’s Sento looked like temples. His interest grew when he began visiting and photographing Sento all over Japan; often unexpectedly running into police, who were suspicious that he was a developer looking to snatch up cheap land – the fate of many old Sento. A number of books later, and Machida is now an authority on Sento. Today he has brought us to what he considers to be the finest example of Tokyo Sento architecture- the 53 year-old Meijin-yu, located in Southwest Tokyo.

Form and function jostle for primacy in the design of Meijin-yu. The O-tera (temple) style facade seems to be merely for decoration, but it actually served an important function in revitalizing Sento culture following the great earthquake in the 12th year of the Taishou Period (1923). Before the earthquake, the architecture and interior design of Tokyo’s Sento was much simpler, more like the style currently seen in Osaka or Kyoto. With the hope of attracting more customers Sento’s began rebuilding themselves after the earthquake, mimicking the look of Shinto and Buddhist shrines. The plan worked and by about 1968 the number of Sento peaked at 2500; today there are fewer than 850. Inside the Tsuiba-jo (dressing rooms) Buddhist temple architecture is further replicated with high ceilings and a unique ‘s’ shaped structure at the juncture between the roof and wall. Careful design is intrinsic to all areas of Sento but seen most functionally in the baths themselves. The jet streams of water bubbling out from some baths are not electronically pressurized, but involve a complex geometric miracle of piping to enable the water to flow on a specific angle and create the right amount pressure. The shower area itself must also be slanted on the correct angle to ensure that no water pools which leads to mold. Old Sento can last a long time without repairs, resilient against the constant humidity and steam.

Although Tokyo’s Sento are beautiful, Machida prefers the unadorned, minimalist baths of Osaka and Kyoto. He did not see much spiritual significance in the Tokyo style aside from a brazen attempt at attracting more customers. But as he begins to talk about the history of Sento, the spiritual dimension is hard to ignore and makes you wonder about their inherent sacredness. The first public baths in Japan were actually holy baths used for the priests which Kõmyõ Kõgõ, in an act of altruism, allowed the poor to use in the time before the Kamakura period (1185 – 1333).

Reaching further back, the very idea of bathing in the Sento style came from India, and its long tradition of body cleansing with Japan’s first baths used as an extension of the temple, reserved only for the priests, to literally and symbolically purify themselves. Today, the cycle from sacred to commonplace has almost come full circle, as Sento’s increasingly become patronized by those seeking something more than just a physical cleansing: a respite from the city, a return to a more familiar age, a space for warding off loneliness.

Myojin-Yu: 5-14-7 Minami Yukigaya, Ota-ku, Tokyo. 03-3729-2526

Kiyoto Maruyama is one of two remaining “Penki-eshi” (Sento painters) in Tokyo. Today he is painting the back wall of Fujino-yu, but as we arrive he climbs down from the scaffolding, walks through the coffee cans and paint tins to sit down in front of us. His track pants and slip on canvas shoes are coated in a dense patina of blue and white paint and behind his seated silhouette, today’s wet, half-finished portrait of Mt. Fuji is drying in the afternoon sunlight. “Sometimes they request that I paint in the middle, for both baths,” Moriyama gestures to the wall space above the partition between male and female baths
, “but I don’t like that because then I will have to paint the holy mountain much bigger. Big mountains are scary.” Sento painting, today is neither lucrative nor easy and Moriyama is lucky to paint five Sento a month these days. Compared to the ’70s when he was painting daily. He turns to look at his equipment, “these days young people don’t have the concentration or patience to become good at something like this. After Nakajima and his assistant, there will be no more Sento painters. It is sad.”

Penki-eshi didn’t always paint the holy mountain. There was a time when most Sento’s wanted “Mickey Mouse, Gundam, and Doraemon” says Moriyama, almost farming a frown, “I really didn’t like it.” Looking back to the mountain he jokes, “I once tried to paint a castle, but it transformed into Fuji.” The goal when painting Mount Fuji is to let the bathers feel as though they are bathing in sacred waters flowing directly from the holy mountain itself. This spiritual illusion is deeply respected and there are certain rules about what cannot be painted. Fuji must never be painted at sunset nor bathed in red sunlight, due to associations with blood and death. Water is also where individual style becomes clear; compared to Nakajima’s fierce sea and towering ocean spray, Moriyama’s waters are perfectly calm, almost transcendently so. Echoing the same calm tone as his waters, Moriyama glows with happy equanimity despite standing at the end of an era.

Fujino Yu
1-30-10 Shinmei-cho
Hamura-shi, Tokyo
TEL: 042-554-1047

This story originally appeared in Paper Sky No. 31 (Denmark, November, 2009)

そんな文化財保護事情において、愛媛県松山市・道後温泉にある「道後温泉本館」は、今でも共同浴場として利用されている、貴重な場所である。温泉街にひときわ目立つ三層楼の木造の湯小屋は、明治27年に建築され、それから100年以上もの間、共同浴場として地域に根ざしてきた。1階に「神の湯」、2階に「霊の湯」という浴場があり、2階や3階の広間や個室では、貸し浴衣やお茶とお菓子のサービスが付く。銭湯感覚で通う地元の人々から観光で訪れた人々まで、幅広いくつろぎの場を提供してくれる。

早朝、振鷺閣の太鼓が鳴り響くのを合図に、地域の人たちが朝湯へと向かう。湯口からはアルカリ性のなめらかな湯が豊富に湧き、訪れる人たちは頬を赤く染めながら湯浴みに興じる。道後温泉本館の保存修復案もあがっていたが、その計画は温泉施設としての機能を維持したまま進められることになり、地域の人たちの大切な日課は、建物とともにしっかりと守られることとなった。この場所を訪れるとき、いつも印象的なのが、雑巾を片手に、廊下や柱、窓枠など、至る所を掃除している人の姿が常にあることだ。隅々までぴかぴかに磨き込まれた建物は、そこに刻み込まれた記憶とともに、これからも受け継がれていくことだろう。こうした建物が人々の暮らしの中で、生き生きと輝き続けることを願ってやまない。

道後温泉本館
愛媛県松山市道後湯之町５−６
‎089-921-5141‎

With wrinkled and nimble hands Shusetsu Tachibana washes the back of 77 year old Sugiwara-san. As the oldest customer at Saito-yu, Sugiwara-san is only a few years younger than the baths themselves. This washing ritual is very old and well known; Tachibana-san has done it tens of thousands of times. His hands move quickly between multiple points on the back, arms and head. Simultaneously pushing, pulling, pinching. He sways and jerks, moving his body repetitively as he massages. His eyes are closed; he looks somnolently drunk in his focus. This “seventy-something” year old, is the last of his kind, a Sanske – washer and masseuse for the Sento. Once he retires, a whole profession will also retire. In a city of cathartic change, like Tokyo, it is incredible that someone like Tachibana-san exists, a living relic from an pre-modern age. In every other Japanese Sento his job has been replaced by robots – sad looking massage chairs.

Today he will spend his day in almost the same way as when he began the job at 15. Although things are much quieter now then they were in Showa 28 (1953). In those days the Sento’s were chaotic and crowded, filled with “more cute girls”. Today the Sento is filled almost exclusively with the elderly who lend the Sento an air of nostalgia, aging it in ways the dated baths and lockers never could.

Tachibana-san is the fourth son in a farming family from Hima in Toyama Prefecture. It is traditional that only the first son will work on the farm, so like his other sibling’s he had to find work on his own. After finishing middle school at 15 he came to Tokyo with a firm goal – to work in a bathhouse. At that time demand was high and he took on work at many Sento, rotating between them working as a Banto-san, which involved a variety of chores including general cleaning, and keeping the boiler at the right temperature. Trying to ask him more details about that era drew long pauses, “I forget a lot of the past, but when i begin washing it starts to come back to me”. So, we pay our ¥400, put everything we own into a locker and enter the baths naked, with only a wooden token reading ‘togashi’ (back rub). After sitting down on a plastic stool, and washing ourselves, Tachibana-san appears in his uniform – a white singlet and black shorts – and begins to work on our backs. In older times he would have been called up with a bell, one ring for a man, two for a woman. In those times he might have been tending to the boiler when the call came, burning old furniture to keep the baths at a perfect temperature. Today our wash begins with a vigorous back scrub with a coarse cloth where the soap lathers up in little mountains. This is followed by a long togashi. As it finishes you feel transported to an unfamiliar and relaxing place; Tachibana-san awakens from the ritual, nods quietly, collects your wooden tokens and wanders back to the boiler in the same way he has for over fifty years.

Original Text and Photography in Paper Sky No. 31 (Denmark, 2009)

Address: 6-59-2 Higashi Nippori, Arakawa-ku, Tokyo, Japan.