Naked Tokyo

By Kevin Cooney

       I trust naked people.  It just seems natural.  Naturally, an open palm (showing no weapon) evolved into the handshake.  Nudity, however, is not something I'm used to sharing as easily as a handshake. Strangely though, when an old man shuffles towards me at my local sento (bathhouse) and asks some random question or reminds me not to soap in the sento, something that would normally annoy me, I pause and smile because I trust the guy.  How could I not he's standing there naked in front of me.  At least I assume he is, as I desperately try to block his figure from the blurry periphery of my averted eyes and think happy thoughts.  Like I said, I'm still not totally used to it.

        I visit my local sento about 3 or 4 times a month.  It's something I'd never have imagined doing before I lived here.  Now, I relish the slow, relaxing evenings when I can go have, what we call back in New York, a shvitz.  But the sento is a bit more, I think, than just a place to take a bath.

I've developed my own, totally fact-less theory based on the various neighborhoods I've lived during my 8 years in Tokyo.  Neighborhoods that have more sentos, have fewer crazy people.  I suppose the reason is simply that neighbors that bathe together, live well together.  I've seen a large portion of the men in my current neighborhood naked.  It seems strange to say that.  But that being said, I actually know the majority of my current neighborhood.  Now this is not that I hadn't tried in other neighborhoods.  They were bigger, noisier, less friendly neighborhoods like Shibuya where neighbors didn't even acknowledge each other, clothed, much less naked.

The long history of Japan (I'll go out on a limb here even though I wasn't present for most of it) was one of community.  Just as it took a community to grow rice, it took a community to raise the children and keep the streets clean, safe and friendly.  But what Tokyo's kids seem to be learning from the paranoia of their modern day parents is that anyone and everyone outside of the family unit is a psycho to be avoided.  I'm all for protecting the kids, but GPS trackers and mobile phones that give parents constant updates as to the child's location, while technologically possible, are no match to having a strong community of neighbors who look out for each other and their kids.  In this sense I would trust my children with my naked neighbor more than a GPS tracking device.

I have this small paranoid fear that someday I'm going to choke on something while eating dinner in my bachelor pad. I'm going to go next door and knock frantically.  When the Japanese old man opens the door and sees the blue colored foreigner gesticulating wildly at him will just close the door and go back to watching TV.  In the morning when he finds my asphyxiated body on his doorstep, he'll tell the police, "well, if he spoke better Japanese I would have known what he wanted."  And that will be the end of me.

But I know that won't happen.  Because, I've seen the old man who lives next door naked.  What do we have to be strangers about?  I live in a neighborhood where I think someone might give me the Heimlich.  There is something comforting about that.  There is something comforting about naked tokyo.