Yumoto has two streets and a dozen tea-houses, whose galleries are hung with red lanterns, as if in perpetual fête, and an atmosphere nearly all sulphuretted hydrogen. One of the hot springs bubbles up at the entrance of the village, filling a tank about ten feet square, covered by a roof resting on four corner pillars. The sides are all open to the air, and an Arcadian simplicity of bathing arrangements prevails. Citizens and sojourners stroll hither, because the site commands a view of the thoroughfare, remove and fold up their garments, and sit down in the pool. When sufficiently boiled, they cool off occasionally on the edge of the tank, and then drop into the pool again. If the company prove agreeable, the bath occupies hours. More open-air pavilions are at the end of the village, where more bronze figures boil and cool themselves in the same exoteric fashion. The public bath-houses, that alternate with the tea-houses in the village streets, have roofs and sides of solid wood, except the street front, which is open and curtainless, and within which men, women, and children meet in the hot-water tanks, as at the market-place or street-corners in other countries. To a new-comer this extraordinary simplicity is startling, but if he stays long enough, he finds that the childlike innocence and unconcern of the people make a new code of the proprieties.
These infantile views of the Japanese as to bathing make even the great pay little attention to the seclusion and inviolateness of the bath-room. In a high-class Japanese house, or at the best tea-houses, this is an exquisitely artistic nook, with cement walls and floors, inlaid with fantastic stones and bits of porcelain. The oval tubs are of pine, bound with withes, and white with scouring. The doors are generally sliding paper screens without locks, and the wooden wall, or door, if there be one, is full of fantastic holes and tiny windows with no curtain. Often the bath-house is a detached pavilion, to which you are expected to walk in a special bath gown, or ukata, meeting, on the way, household and guests, who are always ready for a friendly chat. Europeans can hardly make a Japanese servant understand that in their order of arrangements, the bath and the bath-room are for the use of one person at a time. The Japanese wooden tub is vastly better than the zinc coffins and marble sarcophagi in which we bathe. The wood keeps the water hotter and is pleasanter to the touch. One kind of tub has a tiny stove with a long pipe in one end, and with a mere handful of charcoal such a tub is filled with boiling water in the briefest time. Many bathers have lost their lives by the carbonic acid gas sent off by this ingenious contrivance. A Japanese hot bath is only a point or two from boiling. The natives bear this temperature without wincing, and will step from this scalding caldron out-of-doors, smoking along the highway on a frosty day, like the man whom Dr. Griffis describes. Our grave and statuesque landlord at Yumoto, who sat like a Buddha behind his low table and held court with his minions, once appeared to us stalking home in the starlight with all his clothes on his arm. His stride was as stagey and majestic as ever, there being no reason, in his consciousness, why he should lay off his dignity with his garments, they representing to him the temporary and accidental, not the real envelope of the pompous old soul.
PUBLIC BATH-HOUSE AT YUMOTO
At some of the great mineral springs there are now separate pools for men and women, in deference to foreign prejudice; but more than one generation will pass before promiscuous bathing is done away with.
At all medicinal springs the baths are owned and managed by the Government and are free to the people. Here at Yumoto, men, women, and children walk into the one large room containing the pools, undress, lay their clothing in a little heap on the raised bench or platform running around the edge of the room, and step into the water; and, as has been said, no one sees any impropriety in this custom. Women sit or kneel on the edges of the pool, scouring themselves with bags of rice-bran, and chattering with their friends in or out of the water. People stop at the open doors, or breast-high windows, to talk to the bathers, and conduct is as decorous, as reserved, and as modest as in a drawing-room. The approach of a foreigner sends all the grown bathers deep into the water, simply out of respect to his artificial and incomprehensible way of looking at natural things. They know, though they cannot understand, that the European finds something objectionable, and even wrong, in so insignificant a trifle as being seen without clothes.
At our tea-house in Yumoto our three rooms in the upper story were thrown into one during the daytime, making an apartment open to the gallery on three sides. Hibachis, or braziers, with mounds of glowing charcoal, tempered the morning and evening air, and all day we could sit on piles of futons, and enjoy the superb picture of mountains and lake before us. We were poled over the placid water in a queer ark of a boat, and the mountain-paths were always alluring, the roughest trail often passing under torii, or leading past some shrine, just when it seemed that no foot had ever preceded ours. At night, when the chilling air presses the sulphur fumes closer to earth, Yumoto streets resound with the wailing whistle of the blind shampooer, or amah. These amah are found everywhere—in the largest cities and in the smallest mountain villages—and, whether men or women, are never young, or even middle-aged. Theirs is an indefinite, unscientific system of massage, and their manipulations often leave their charges with more lame and aching muscles than before. But the amah are an institution of the country, and Yumoto streets would ring with their dreary music, and our screens would be slipped aside by many an ill-favored crone, as soon as it was time for the usual evening baths to be prepared at the tea-houses.