Posts Tagged ‘onsen’

If you don’t want to appear nude on Japanese TV, don’t let them film you taking a bath

A TV Asahi news piece from 2006 about Eddie, an American in Tokyo who dreams of becoming a lawyer in Japan and living in an expensive apartment in the Roppongi Hills complex:

Eddie was living in an old public bath that had been converted into a Sakura House group living space. The wall of his room was covered with Japanese flags (including an imperial chrysanthemum flag) and photos of Aya Ueto (his ideal woman). To prepare for his dream of becoming a lawyer, he was reading weekly tabloid magazines for Japanese language practice.

Eddie, who uploaded this video himself to YouTube, provided the following description:

“When we went to the onsen, they promised me that they would only film me from the waist up, but they turned out to be a bunch of liars as i was practically naked in the first shot of the whole interview. The whole process was really awkward since my Japanese was great and the TV crew spoke no english. I had also just gotten back from America the night before so I was exhausted from jetlag. It is easily my most embarrassing moment (many kids came up to me the next day at school saying they’d seen me naked, and one of my bosses at the law firm I used to work at saw it by chance while in the hospital) So more or less I appeared naked and acting like a total douche clown on the Japanese equivalent of NBC Nightly News. “

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Japanese Spa Resort Opens Chocolate Bath

Valentine’s Day is coming soon, so Hakone’s Yunessun Spa Resort has opened a special chocolate bath:

According to the Yunessun homepage, the chocolate bath will be open to visitors from January 13th until February 18th, with special additions of chocolate syrup into the bath at 10:30AM and 2:00PM daily.

Yunessun is well known for its many special baths, which include a green tea bath, a wine bath, a coffee bath, and even ramen and curry baths!

Goshi-Goshi Towel Defeats Foreign Towels

Here are a couple videos from a TV program about introducing Japan’s great “treasures” to foreign countries [shown previously in the Turkish schoolgirls post]. The first video demonstrates how the goshi-goshi towel is vastly superior to anything non-Japanese countries have produced:

Normally I’d be annoyed by a clip that puts giant X’s through the preferred foreign methods of doing something and highlights the Japanese way as clearly perfect. It’s especially lame when they’re doing it for something like the goshi-goshi towel, something that many Japanese people probably don’t even prefer to use when washing themselves, judging from all the foreign brushes and washcloths for sale alongside goshi-goshi towels on store shelves. However, I’ll forgive them because they ended the clip with this declaration:

I’ll concede that the goshi-goshi may indeed be parfect.

The program later sent tubby wrestler Koriki to a hot spring in Hungary to see what Hungarians thought of the goshi-goshi towel, which was pretty interesting: