October 21, by Maggie McNeill. Well, as it turns out my husband was recently in Japan on business and his host invited him and another gentleman from his company to go along with him to a soapland; he told me about it when he returned and we both felt my readers might be interested in a first-person account of what goes on there.
The soapland we visited was in a largely-residential urban neighborhood where there were several such places, but some are not open to gaijin so we drove around a little until the doorman of one of them flagged us down and showed us a parking place. We exchanged our shoes for slippers at the door, then he took us into an anteroom. She took my hand and escorted me to the third floor; her English was good enough in combination with sign language that she could communicate sufficiently for the situation.
The room to which she brought me had a normally-floored section where we came in, then the rest of it was like a very large, sunken shower floor with brown tiles. To my right there was a shelving unit with a small dorm-type refrigerator and to my left a massage table; the sunken section had a large Roman-style tub filled to the brim with water.
She had me get undressed and put my clothes in baskets she gave me, then she undressed as well and I waited while she got her things ready for the session. After a couple of minutes she called me to come down and had me sit on a stool whose seat was actually two pads with a large gap between so as to expose the whole crotch area. She turned on the water in the tub, and it immediately started overflowing onto the tile floor. Next, she used a flexible shower fitting to wash my crotch, then scrubbed me completely from head to toe with a scrubby and a strong but pleasant-smelling soap.
After washing herself in the same way, she told me to get in the tub; the water was the perfect temperature. That was just a preliminary, though; she got out of the tub, moved the stool aside and brought out an air mattress with a lip running around the edge; it was like a combination air mattress and kiddie pool.
