Excavating bathhouse geographies
The city and world look different at different scales. Sento offer a way to see locally
The greatest pleasure of working on a project like Inari-yu Nagaya is getting to know the neighbors. After hundreds of days building and running our “community living room” over the past three years, I now know dozens of the local residents, from little babies and kids who come to buy candy and milk to the regular grandmas and grandpas at the bath.
It’s always a good day when I see Matsumoto-san, the elderly woman who lives in an old shophouse along the main street of the Nakasendo, from where she has walked to the public bath daily for the past sixty years. She keeps her curly hair cut short at the salon across the street from the sento, where she can often be found chatting with her friends. She grins whenever she sees Samu-kun (that’s me) and we banter about the weather and events coming up at the Nagaya. Rain or shine, she always shows up when we serve breakfast.
A few weeks ago, I pulled up on my bike as she was walking over to the bath and told her I had just started selling gelato at the Nagaya. After bathing, she came around the corner with a friend. I helped lift their walkers over the threshold and served them yuzu and watermelon ice cream. I mentioned that I had brought the tubs of gelato on my bike from a popular shop in Myogadani. “Where’s Myogadani?” she asked.
Myogadani would almost certainly have meant something to a younger resident of this area. Someone who goes shopping in Ikebukuro and moves widely through the city by train would at least be familiar with the metro stop. But I wasn't surprised that a district just three kilometers away towards the center of the city didn’t ring a bell. For her and some of the other old residents here, life plays out within a personal geography rooted in Takinogawa, not Tokyo.
Learning from local worlds
My organization Sento & Neighborhood (IG | Substack) recently began a three-year project to interview residents and gather memories of the neighborhoods around the surviving public baths in Tokyo’s Kita Ward. There were around 100 baths in the ward at their peak in the mid-20th century, and now just over twenty remain.
Spending a lot of time talking with people in bathhouses and their neighborhoods means constantly dwelling on what is in the process of being lost. Porous architecture, tradition, memory, but perhaps most of all, a form of sociality that is made possible by geographically compact networks. The residents and bathhouse owners who participate in our interviews and workshops describe the city relationally, in terms of people and places, down the street and around the corner from here, across from such-and-such’s house, all within a few minutes walk.
Relationships stitch the city together spatially; they also stretch back through time—to the third-generation owner who ran the sento after the war and whose beautiful voice carried across the dressing room and echoes in the memories of his neighbors half a century later. To ancestors who migrated from rural Niigata and Ishikawa, who apprenticed in relatives’ baths, or who moved to their current location after their old bathhouse in Asakusa burned down in the earthquake a century ago.
Neighborhood life emerges, accumulates, disappears. The street Matsumoto-san walks daily was a rural path 100 years ago, when her house was still surrounded by fields of mulberry, radish, and barley and sat across the road from a 300-year-old seed merchant. Not long after, in order to clear land to build a movie theater, her family dismantled an old Edo-era row house on their property and sold it to the bathhouse—the building that’s now our Nagaya. The movie theater thrived for half a century, and children would sometimes gather to watch from outside through a propped-open emergency door. Now it’s been gone for half a century, replaced by a building where we often go to eat and drink sake at the retro izakaya with kitsch crustacean versions of The Last Supper and The Creation of Adam on the walls. Recently, history has come full circle: a resident who lives in an apartment upstairs has started serving food at the Nagaya.
Memories converge around the amusing entanglements of local community, too. The fishmonger in “bargain alley” who if you asked in the wrong way would throw a fit and refuse to sell you fish, like the Seinfeld Soup Nazi. But he was the only fishmonger in the neighborhood, so we all had to go! How Matsumoto-san’s husband, a scaffolder, was one of the many men in the building trades who lived in the neighborhood and would handstand atop tall ladders on festival day. Ito-san adds, Yes, and they were all loyal customers at our rice shop, so when it came time to hire someone to build a new house, we had a problem on our hands!
This sort of work oftentimes feels like the excavation of historical minutiae. That alone can be a satisfying pursuit if you are curious in the way I am. But something else emerges from the sum of individual experiences: the contours of a very different way of urban life, one that holds lessons for what it means to live alongside neighbors.
Such local networks are fading day by day in Tokyo. Surely, there are few people today who live entirely in the narrow geographies that once shaped life around the baths. I criss-cross the city every day, go back and forth between Tokyo and the countryside every month, and fly across an ocean every year. But one of the problems of the human condition today is that space is no longer socially produced in ways that make it easy for us to be in a place and truly of it. That’s why to participate in the daily life of a local community, and to find a warm bath and neighbors who smile when they see you, is to discover that there are few things far or near that could be worth more.
Sam, this is a lovely story. May we all figure the ways to birth more neighborhoods that people can be both 'in and of'.
I love the community memories that you've been able to discover!