The first time I stepped into an onsen, my life changed for the better.
Picture the scene: 2019. Late September. Asakusa heat, skytree shimmering in the background. Dusty park benches and dodie’s ‘Boys Like You’ in my bluetooth headphones. Tan lines splitting my shoulders after two months spent half-covered by a girlfriend’s old DofE rucksack. Evening comes on thick in Tokyo. Backdropped by the buzz of cicadas and that wonderfully moist smell of Japanese summer, my thirteen theatre tour friends and I decide to take a trip to the public bath.
I lied actually. Sorry. It wasn’t an onsen. We thought it was an onsen then, but now I know it to have been a sento. Onsen are naturally-occuring hot springs, whereas sento are public baths made by human hands. Both are lovely. Both are relaxing. Both require you to strip down to nothing and sit in a bath with many other naked humans.
I remember realising this last fact only as I stood in a lift shoulder-to-shoulder with my friends about to enter the female changing rooms. I also remember the massively crippling ball of anxiety that accompanied said realisation.
All my friends were going to see my tits.
And even worse, they were going to see my stomach.
To call me terrified was an understatement. Images of Carrie flooded my brain, skewed shots of easy-wipe tiles and fingers pointing at me. Flashing lights and tears pouring down my face. Unlike Carrie, I didn't have any sonic murder power to make the bullies go away. It was just me, and a body far cries away from the one I'd been raised to desire.
As it turned out, to worry about all those things was futile. Most of my anxiety was, if you'll pardon the pun, washed away the minute I stepped into the changing rooms and was immediately met with the image of an octogenarian naked Japanese woman. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall, and her nipples couldn't be more than two foot off the ground. Her stance was squat and she had a stomach which made a small frown with skin dropping either side of her belly button. Small wisps from a shock of newly-dried hair poked out from her frazzled ponytail.
And she was the most beautiful person I've seen in a while.
She barely looked at us when we entered the changing rooms, which was strange given our varying non-southeast Asianness and university-student haircuts. Instead she went over to a coin locket, pulled out her bra, and started chatting to an equally naked woman doing the same thing. I went to the toilet and thought about the women I'd just seen, and how I was soon to become one of them. Better to not think, I concluded. Striding over to a locker next to my friend Daisy, I stripped off my tank top and bra before my brain could talk me out of it.
Half an hour later I sit with my friends in a warm mineral-rich pool. The echoes of embarrassment still bounce between us in occasional glances at breasts or stares at the ceiling, but we’ve since moved past awkward silence. Instead we’re discussing how in all our lives up to this moment, we’d never been so comfortable in our own skins, or as vulnerable. Even with romantic partners. For the first time we sat and stood naked. Not viewed, compared, objectified. We just were. Someone comments that the only people to see us naked in a non-sexual way like this were our parents. Now it's our parents, us eight friends/tour colleagues, and about a dozen Japanese women whose bodies range from comfortable and soft to model-type physiques - which in non-studio lighting even look normal.
‘We’re all really hot’, says Chloe. None of us disagree.
Which is strange, because I spent my entire life before then saying otherwise. As had the rest of the world. As it continued to do.
The minute I step outside I am pulled back into a body-shaming reality where thinness is success and fat is evil. From the models on billboards in the Tokyo Metro, to the UK government backing calorie information on restaurant menus as a way to encourage weight loss. I do think, though, that fat is vilified in Japan far more than in the UK. On my TikTok For You page I find interviews with young women weighing no more than 50kg (or just under 8 stone for those of you in the UK) saying they ‘need’ to lose weight because their thighs or face are ‘chubby’. In my student’s new year’s resolution homework I see the words ‘lose weight’ appear again and again. In teacher training I’m told how beneficial Japanese life is because of ‘how much weight you’ll lose’ - this has happened three separate times both before and after I moved. And in my annual health checkup (compulsory for all Japanese employees), I am told I’m too fat because even though my BMI is in the normal range for my height in the UK, it is ‘not normal in Japan’.
Not that you’d know of course - many people in this place seem semi-obsessed with two particularly-placed globules of fat. On the magazine rack in convenience stores I see cover images of breasts that would make a page-3 fan blush. Countless manga and videogame characters sport grossly-overproportioned chest sizes (especially given their age). If I wear a low-cut top I feel the burn of stares on the subway and in the street. In one particularly uncomfortable scene, a male colleague at staff drinks called me ‘big momma’ and compared the size of my breasts to other Japanese female staff members’.
Back when I was trying to love myself more in the aftermath of my sento epiphany, I used to do this thing where I looked myself dead straight in the mirror and proclaimed:
‘God, the Ancient Greeks would have loved you’.
Lame as it sounds, it worked. And still does on the rare occasions when I need to bring myself back to reality. Which I’ve definitely needed to do here in Japan far more than my last few years in London.
But should I be complaining like this? Should I be grateful for the attention of others? Japanese society has been welcoming to me in many ways, not least in peoples’ kindness, curiosity, and politeness. My status as ‘gaijin’ (foreigner) means I am also spared from too much overt judgement and pressure to change when compared to my Japanese friends and colleagues. Is this what Simone de Beauvoir meant when she wrote of the ‘Privileged Other’*? Am I able to enjoy the luxury of complaining whilst simultaneously finding myself revered because of my foreignness, particularly my whiteness?
I think the answer is ‘yes’ - I’m quoting Simone de Beauvoir for Christ’s sake, no-one completely under-privileged bitches whilst referencing late 20th century feminists.
There is room for nuance though I believe. Just as my figure and whiteness serve as a source of power in certain aspects of my life in Japan, it is equally true that this society would be lethal for the version of me that weighed herself every day for seven years. Sort of feels like a slap in the face to that girl in the sento who realised for the first time it might actually be worth taking the time to love what she saw in the mirror each day.
I can’t help but feel like this is yet another thing we’re scared to talk about as foreigners in Japan. We are told it’s far more preferable to sweep casual fat-shaming under the notional rugs of ‘cultural differences’ or ‘not that deep’ (‘just don’t listen to them, you’re beautiful the way you are’). And I’m not saying health isn't important - I think we all know health is important. But I would hope we also know that not all thin people are healthy. Some people are built to be fatter than others, and we shouldn’t shame them for that. Just as we shouldn’t shame or glorify those built naturally slimmer. I most certainly would not be healthy if I weighed under 50kg. My body just isn’t meant to function that way, and that took me about twenty three years to work out.
I don't need to change my weight. I am strong. I can laugh and walk and write and have sex and eat good food and ride a bike and swim in seas and pools. One day I won’t be able to do these things, so I will enjoy them whilst I can. The Greeks would have loved me, I know this to be true.
But I don’t know if I can say the same about Japan.
I need to cool off from this post. See you at the onsen, and remember to enjoy yourself until then no matter your shape.
All my stars,
Char xxx
^A painted lady, loose and large. According to this society. Sending love to all those as fed up as I am about other people deciding its okay to make other people feel bad. Get a real hobby ffs.
*Kruks, S. (2005). Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Privilege. Hypatia, 20(1), 178–205. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3810848
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