Hot Water

The Frenchman has his cafe, the Briton his pub, but for Japan's man in the street the place to meet has been, for the past three centuries, a big bathtub. Throughout Tokyo today, where in working class neighborhoods up to 80% of the population still lacks private facilities, more than 1,600,000 men and women immerse themselves companionably every evening in the steaming vats of the city's 2,608 sento or public bathhouses. There Suzuki-san discusses the besuboru pennant race, and his wife, behind a flimsy partition (a late 19th century concession to Occidental prudery), catches up on the neighborhood gossip. The kids make the usual deafening racket but, as one sento enthusiast puts it knowingly, "When everybody is naked, camaraderie just naturally follows."

Wholesale Murder? Camaraderie, however, was notably absent last week. The chimneys of all but a handful of the city's sento were smokeless, and signs on the doors read, "Suto--Chu [On strike--closed]." The sento suto was called because the city government had been stalling for nearly six months on granting a rate increase from 6.3-c- to 8.8-c- per adult admission requested by the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Bathhouse Business Association on grounds of "increased expenses."

But the sento owners reckoned without the furious public. PEOPLE FLARE UP IN ANGER, screamed the banner headline in Tokyo's largest daily Yomiuri Shimbun; it reported that irate callers were jamming the paper's switchboard with threats to smash sento windows and protests that "They are infringing on basic human rights!" Cried Mrs. Eiko Takada, 24, mother of three: "How can we keep our babies living without bathing them at least once a day? Is the sento association trying to commit wholesale murder of babies?" Declared Mrs. Mumeo Oku, the vocal chairwoman of the Tokyo Housewives Association: "These men must be out of their minds. How could they think of turning us women, who are their best clients, into their bitterest enemies?"*

Sanitation's Sake. Needless to say, they hadn't thought of it--and when they did, they were appalled. "Women and women's stockings, you know, are the things that have become strong in this country since the war," muttered one association official, understandably declining to be identified. Though 500 sento owners staged a sit-in outside the office of Tokyo's Governor Ryutaro Azuma, they seemed downright delighted the next day when he forced them to call off the strike, "for the sake of sanitation among the citizenry." The governor conceded that approval of the rate increases just possibly could be speeded up, but the important thing was clearly to get the sento owners out of their own hot water.

* Not affected by the strike, and possibly responsible for the comparatively subdued tone of the male outcry: the city's 100-odd toruko buro, or Turkish bathhouses, famed for their bikini-clad and sometimes surprisingly versatile masseuses.

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