Baths and お湯

Last night I finally had a conversation with 健太, (kenta) my homestay brother, that I've been meaning to have for a long time, and we managed to clear up a bit of cross-cultural misunderstanding. When I first arrived, my homestay parents mentioned that I should shower in the morning. I was a bit surprised, because the Japanese tradition is to have a bath (in Japanese it's called お風呂 (ofuro)) before you go to bed, but I didn't want to risk being rude and I definitely wasn't comfortable enough with my Japanese yet. So for the last four months or so I've been showering.

Yesterday I asked Kenta if it would be okay with my homestay parents if I used the bath instead. He said that they had been assuming, and had actually been told this by the people at the exchange office at Kwansei Gakuin, that foreigners wouldn't want to bathe in the evening. I explained in my turn that while I thought showers were just fine, I was here to experience Japan and Japanese culture and as he knows the bath is a big part of this.

It's weird though, there's some basic assumptions we were both making that are a bit odd. I thought that maybe my homestay parents didn't want me to use the bath. In Japan, you wash outside the tub, and then soak in the hot bathwater to warm and relax yourself, water that everybody shares. I was worried that maybe there was some feeling of not wanting to share bathwater with me, so to speak. That was sort of silly, they're very nice people.

Kenta said that even when exchange students want to use the ofuro at first, it usually only takes about three days for them to go back to taking showers. Apparently us foreigners need to have a shower in the morning to wake up. I thought that was weird, but I asked around and a couple of my friends do the shower thing out of choice. I still feel like my family should have given me a choice at the very beginning, but there was a very sizeable language barrier there I guess.

Anyway, let's talk about language again. When Kenta was explaining how to use the ofuro to me (it's trickier than you think) I realized something important. In Japanese, there is a word for water, 水 (mizu), and a different word for hot or boiling water, お湯 (oyu). Oyu is not a form of mizu, it is a totally different substance. Oyu is what you have in your bath, oyu is what you use to make tea, and in Japan both the bath and tea are semi-religious, at least sacrosanct, experiences. In Japanese, you don't say that the bathwater has cooled down, you say that the bathwater has become mizu.

And I think that's fascinating. But I'm late for lunch and must run! Tomorrow: The Return of 15 Things!