Advice from a Seasoned Professional

My first time living in Japan—properly living, not touristing—was in a small town called Nakatsu, Oita Prefecture, where I worked as a middle school English teacher. Every city and region in Japan has one or more local claims-to-fame, and in Nakatsu’s case those specialties were fried chicken, eel, getting shit-faced on weekends with potato liquor, and also hot springs.

The natural volcanic springs of Kyushu are of great pride throughout southern Japan. The government even has laws about what facilities can be called natural hot springs (“onsen”) versus man-made public baths (“sento”), based on geothermal heating and the mineral content of the bathhouse’s water. An onsen must legally have a certain percentage of natural hot spring water in its baths, and the most impressive ones, in my personal opinion, are white with sediment, thick like milk, and smell like the devil’s asshole.

While living in Nakatsu, my coworkers and I began a weekly tradition of rolling out to the local “super onsen” down the main road, Sakura Onsen. This was not the most “legit” onsen experience, to be frank. It was no devil’s asshole. But it was close by and, best of all, had half a dozen baths on both sides of the gender divide, indoor and outdoor, as well as saunas and salt scrubs—this is what makes an onsen “super”. We were spoiled to have such a lively onsen in our regular stomping grounds.

The evening began with a round up: John revved the engine of his tiny breadbox car and all the English teachers in the apartment block came scurrying out with their bags of towels and clothes. We piled in. John’s wife Sierra was joining on this day—thank God! There were far too many weeks when I was the only vagina-bearer, and that always meant a lonely, if contemplative, evening on the ladies’ side. John nosed the car out of the apartment driveway, and wound along the tiny roads beside dragonfly-flecked rice paddies, squeezed between old houses, and merged onto the major thoroughfare.

One of my coworkers, Frazer, liked to say about our town: “Nakatsu will give you a terrible first impression, and a wonderful final impression.” I have to say this is accurate. The main street of Nakatsu is fucking ugly. It reminds me a little of those memes of “the American wasteland” that circulate online—perhaps that is why I always felt at home. A flat, cracked asphalt road, car dealerships, gas stations, fast food restaurants, and a forest of obnoxious flags flapping frantically at passersby. We drove past several gangs of chain-smoking, orange-haired delinquents—they nodded at me and I waved back merrily. My students!

Sakura Onsen itself is in perhaps the ugliest part of town of all, behind the car dealerships and next to the screaming pachinko parlor and secondhand shop. Everything is very broad and spacious in a rural town like Nakatsu, so parking was never a problem. We filed in and the receptionist, Kawaguchi-san, lit up; we were her favorite foreigner brigade. As is common at a bigger franchise like a super onsen, we paid via a ticket machine. The main ticket is for admission, with extra tickets for small face towels, bigger rental towels, soap bars, and toiletries.

Pro tip: always bring your own towel to avoid vexing extra expenses… and to hide your sinful tattoos from sento staff.

We were far too seasoned to need any of the bells and whistles, so four admission tickets later we were splitting into the ladies and gentlemen sides of the facility. All but the smallest and oldest Japanese onsen are divided into male and female sides, so nonbinary and non-operative transfolk are SOL. Particularly in my younger years when I’d only just come out these divisions weighed heavily on me, but over the years I’d become inured. Kawaguchi-san handed us locker keys as we passed.

This is where the naked people happen. On the other side of that door-curtain behind reception, you will be hit with an expansive locker room absolutely packed with naked people. This can be very shocking to the fresh, puritan traveler, so please gird yourself. Here you can enjoy a total microcosm of Nakatsu society: tiny squealing naked babies; happy, gossiping naked mothers; slow and shaky naked grandmothers. Sometimes, those glamorous and big-breasted ladies I recognize from the hostess clubs come through. Other times, I see my students. Ahh, the number of times I’ve practiced English with a middle schooler and her mom while sitting naked in the acid exfoliation bath, like it’s the most regular thing in the world. It’s the way. You’ll leave this town basically a nudist.

The strangest encounter I’ve ever had in Sakura Onsen was the faith healer. A tiny middle-aged woman sidled up to me in the jet bath one day and asked if she could cure my suffering and physical maladies. Awkwardly I agreed, and soon the woman was mumbling prayers, her hands hovering a few inches from my shoulders. I made a big show afterward of rolling my arms and exclaiming that my body felt lighter and looser, not wanting to hurt her feelings. Internally, I hoped she wasn’t gearing up to sign me into a cult.

Sierra and I found our assigned lockers, stripped, and packed away everything but our towels. Onsen locker keys typically come on an elastic band so you can keep them on your wrist or ankle or even ponytail at all times.

Pro tip: keep the locker key on you at all times. I used to leave my key with my towel, and once as a prank somebody swapped keys! That was the evening I ran around the bathhouse naked, begging Kawaguchi-san for help like the man in “Puss in Boots.”

The next, and most essential, step is to bathe in the shower area. Whether you’re in a sento or an onsen, the baths are more like hot tubs in the Western sense than baths that you wash in. Rather, you’re expected to go in completely clean with your hair tied up, keeping the water nice for the hundreds of people who will dip in and out after you. Sakura Onsen has an impressive long row of seated showers, each equipped with a mirror, hand-held shower head, bath faucet, bucket, and stool. Sakura is also nice enough to provide big bottles of body wash, shampoo, and conditioner for free, but some of the fancier (and stingier) places will make you buy these extras.

Pro tip: do not go to fancy, stingy onsen.

Sierra and I gossiped about this and that while we showered. You’ll find that working as a teacher, many of your conversations end up being about teaching. It’s terribly boring to an outside observer, but there I was, rinsing my hair, leaning forward in absolutely rapt attention while Sierra detailed the new English board in her school hall, and there I was telling her about the Hanukkah lesson I taught my kids and how I got them all dreidel-gambling.

“You gotta start them young, Kat!” she said. “Soon they’ll be hitting the pachinko parlors every day.”

“All day, every day,” I said, and then, like a pre-recorded tape from the teacher training manual, “I’m just glad to give them a diverse, multicultural classroom experience.”

Gosh, English teaching is a strange life.

From the showers, we hit the baths.

Sakura Onsen features such a wide range of baths that it can take many visits to fully enjoy each type. I like to rotate among most of the baths, though I avoid the very hottest as well as the ice cold bath (folk wisdom has it, leaping from hot water to cold and back is very good for health. I’d rather die young). My favorites are the jet baths and the shallow napping baths. Sometimes Sierra and I retire to the dry sauna, or to the salt sauna to scrub ourselves. At times we chat and gossip, but mostly we lean back as if in a daze, watching steam waft up the walls of the massive, high-ceilinged room. Droplets of condensation fall, making you feel like a frog in a terrarium.

While not the most avid onsener, I’ve had my share of strange and wonderful onsen, mostly by accident:

My friend Rubii took me to the highest elevation onsen in Japan, located on a mountaintop in Toyama in the Honshu region. Outside, the snow was packed higher than a tour bus and the roads were plowed-out tunnels. The water was hot and beige like chicken broth. That was my first ever onsen experience. When I left the building, my still-damp skin had steamed in the cold air like I was sublimating into mist.

I’d also been buried in sand at a bath in Beppu, a city not far from Nakatsu—I remember feeling my heartbeat pulsing through my entire body, like I was being squeezed by a giant hand. I thought, this is what it must be like when you’re still in the womb.

Another time, I’d gone to a tiny co-ed onsen in the mountains, also near Beppu. Rather than a facility, it had just been a natural, piping hot creek in the woods which locals had dammed up into three cement pools, with a shack for taking one’s clothes off (you had to be okay with co-ed nudity to bathe here). We’d chatted with a couple of well-hung older gents in the neighboring pool, one of whom turned to me at one point and exclaimed, as if in surprise, “Bijin desu ne! So beautiful!”

Best of all had been the onsen in Yakushima, the thick jungly island a few hours off Kagoshima to the south. We’d hiked for two days through the forest, highlands, and mountaintops, drank river water fragrant with deer piss, and napped in sleeping bags on a hard wooden platform somewhere out by the trail. The onsen afterward—a small local place, its shoe cupboard full of sleeping cats—had been a shocking return to civilization. We looked as rough and wild-eyed as Dr. Zhivago in the steamy shower mirrors.

Novelty is where you make memories. Normalcy—a weekly spot like Sakura Onsen—is where you lose memories, detach yourself from the grind.

Pro tip: seek the novelty. But savor the normalcy.

Back at Sakura Onsen, Sierra and I finished stewing, got out, toweled off, and made our way back to the changing room. It was emptier now as it was quite late in the day. The pine wood floors were warm and smooth underfoot. It was here that the ‘normalcy’ of the day was interrupted.

I was standing in front of my open locker, completely naked, with my towel bunched under my feet, when all of a sudden I felt an uncontrollable rush of water between my legs. Enough that it made a sound when it hit the towel. I gasped and threw my hands over my crotch. I looked up in horror.

“Sierra—! I—I think I’m having a medical emergency!”

She laughed. I stammered again, my eyes huge.

“I couldn’t—did I just pee myself? I couldn’t hold it back at all! Stop laughing, Sierra, it’s serious!”

She was still cackling. “Did your water break, Kat? Because it looked like your water broke.”

Nothing else was coming out. I felt completely fine otherwise. Warily, I knelt down and picked up the towel, raising it to my face. It didn’t smell like piss. It didn’t smell like anything really—nothing you’d expect to come out of your holes. It smelled sort of… clean.

Gradually, Sierra and I pieced together what must have happened.

You were sitting in the jet bath a long time, weren’t you,” she said.

“I was.”

You were sitting cross-legged in the jet bath.”

“Yes.”

“…Ahhhh…”

“Ahhhh!”

And so the evening ended with a bit of mischief from Kat’s sloppy vagina. The theory I have to this day is that, sitting cross-legged in the jet bath, my puss had slurped up approximately four tablespoons of bath water. And it was this bath water which, loosened by gravity, had dribbled from my loins in the changing room later. An undignified conclusion to the day. Luckily none of my students were around.

Pro tip: never sit cross-legged in the jet bath if you have a vagina, or any bodily orifice, really.

————

Kat Joplin is a Tokyo-based journalist, fiction writer, former fetus and future corpse. They also occasionally moonlight as a moderately successful drag queen, performing under the name Le Horla.

Their articles have appeared in Gay Times, QueerAF, and The Japan Times, and their creative work in Beestung Mag, Bloodletter Magazine, and The Examined Life Journal. Find more of their work at KatJoplin.net.