Bare Naked Thoughts

My post the other day got me thinking about the Japanese attitude toward nudity, and some of the inherent contradictions in their modern culture.

For example, as one commenter pointed out, Japanese get naked in front of each other all the time at public baths and hot springs. It`s true that the sexes are almost always segregated at such places, but people still remove all of their clothing in front of other people -- friends and strangers alike.

Contrast this with some of the public swimming pools and gym locker rooms I`ve used over my years in Japan. The sexes are segregated there, too, and yet most women try to cover themselves with their towels as they change.

I`ve never had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall in a men`s locker room (much to my chagrin), but I remember when I was first dating Hub, I asked him if most Japanese men are circumcised. He said he didn`t think so, but he wasn`t sure.

I said, you played baseball all through high school -- didn`t you get a peek at your friends` willies?

No, he said (blushing slightly), why would I look? And besides, we covered ourselves with our towels.

This amazed me. Can you imagine high school athletes daintily covering themselves with little　towels as they changed?

Of course, these are generalizations. I`ve known Japanese men and women who don`t bother covering up, and even a few who claim they enjoy walking around naked. But overall, "letting it all hang out" is not a Japanese trait. My theory is that when you have so many people living in very tight quarters on a tiny island, and privacy is a luxury, modesty is going to be regarded as a virtue. Covering oneself is like staking a claim on the amount of space occupied by your body, and revealing oneself is rudely infringing on others` space.

(And I can finally relate to this -- revealing my own body is likely to make even Westerners avert their eyes. So I cover up out of courtesy, as a public service to those who don`t want to see what having three babies can do to the female figure.)

Another weird contradiction is the company housing project. While customs are changing, traditionally, Japanese "salarymen" are almost supposed to act as if they don`t have families. Many would never think of adorning their desks with photos of their wife and kids, or take a spouse along to a business function. In Japan, I worked mostly for foreign companies, and spouses were usually invited to office parties if people wanted to bring them along. But I never expected to go to any of Hub`s -- it was just not the custom. In Japan, your work life and your home life are separate worlds, and again, I think it`s a "delineating clear boundaries to protect precious privacy" thing.

But some companies also provide housing for their employees. This is eerily like a parallel universe. Imagine this: you spend your working days with men who pretend their families do not exist, and yet all the while, your kids are playing with their kids and your wives are sharing recipes and gossip.

For the first three years of our marriage, Hub and I lived in such housing. It consisted of two four-story concrete buildings erected when Japan was still a developing country, so it had that "Soviet housing block" look and feel to it. Inside each unit were two tatami-mat rooms (6 mats each) a toilet, a bath and a "dining kitchen," which is supposed to mean a kitchen big enough for a table, but of course that depends entirely on how big or small the table in question happens to be, and this space was really pushing it. The rent was only about $300/month, though, so I swallowed my fear of earthquakes and we moved in.

Because I was childless and working at the time, I was not involved in the day-to-day dramas involving the wives and the many children who lived there. I always thought, how great for kids, to live in buildings where they knew all the people, and could run in and out of their friends` apartments. It really was a village.

One problem, as I recall, was that the window in the toilet faced out into the stairwell of the outdoor staircase. This meant that if you weren`t careful as you walked up the stairs, you could make accidental eye contact with a urinating man.

This happened to one woman we knew, a young newlywed. She and her husband both worked for Hub`s organization, where they`d met, and she lived in the apartment above her boss. One night he was pissing and staring dreamily out the window, and she was coming up the stairs, and suddenly they were face to face.

"Good evening," he said. "Good evening," she replied, and was so embarrassed that she ran the rest of the way up the stairs.

See, had that been me, I probably would have stopped and tried to have a conversation about the weather. I just didn`t get it then.

I do remember Hub asked me not to hang my underwear out to dry while we lived there. I thought that was a weird request, because I didn`t wear anything unusual or scandalous -- no thongs, or porn-quality lingerie or anything like that.

But in retrospect, I realize Hub was just asking me, in his usual Japanese way, to be generally discreet while we lived with his co-workers. Even Japanese conversations don`t always explicitly reveal everything, and it took me years to realize this. Come to think of it, for the first decade or so we were together, it`s amazing Hub and I communicated at all.

Thank God we now have bilingual kids to translate for us.