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I don’t know where I first heard about Spa World but I knew that its existence meant that we would have to stop off in Osaka. Spa World is like a 24 hour onsen Disneyland. It’s a mega-spa that fills a huge building in a forgotten corner of the city. There are two floors devoted to bathing, and one floor filled with water slides and amusements. One of the bathing floors focuses on Asian spa culture, with various Asian-style tubs and pools, the other is European. Men use one floor and women the other, and they swap over every month. During our visit the women’s floor is the European experience, though it’s not really very European, more like a Japanese themepark version of a European spa. But first we have to get in. There are very stern signs saying No Tattoos by the entrance. Both Kay and I have tattoos. We know that the No Tattoo rule in Japanese onsen is about keeping out the Yakuza, nobody could ever mistake Kay or I for a tough Japanese gangster, but it’s also about keeping out certain Westerners too. Before we went to Spa World I read a couple of online accounts in which white men with tattoos had been thrown out of Spa World. Granted, they sounded like idiots, but we didn’t want to find ourselves facing the same fate Luckily, our tattoos are small and easily covered by strategic towels and sleeves. Also, the night we visit is a quiet one. We behave discreetly and somehow, even if they notice that we are ink-skinned devils, nobody bothers us at all. Later, in Beppu, I ask a tourist information officer about tattoos and onsen visiting and he said: “No problem! What if it is part of your culture? If Japanese is problem, but for you, no problem.” Visiting the baths for the first time, especially one in a foreign land where you speak little of the local language, is always a complicated and fraught procedure. Spa World is no exception. We buy tickets from a machine, then exchange them for wristbands, we put our shoes in one locker and our clothes in another. We are handed stiff, pink, cotton nighties to wear. I squeeze myself into mine but it is far too small, like a sausage skin. I am so afraid that Spa World will be unavailable to me because I am fat but, joy of joys, when I present the problem to the baths assistant, she pulls out a plus size nightie that fits me like a dream. How I wish that I could have taken photographs of Kay and I wearing these pink nighties. They were slightly below knee-length, had a yoke, a frilly peter pan collar and a full skirt with patch pockets. They were the most unfashionable and unflattering garments imaginable, but they cover our tattoos nicely. The men wear manly blue versions of the same thing. Spa World’s European bathing experience is mind-blowing. Whilst there is little variation in temperature – the baths are uniformly hot – the architecture and style is diverse and bewildering. So, we sit in tub-sized Jacuzzis; we bob and creep in a rocky grotto illuminated by blue light; we burn our feet on the hot tiled floor of the salt bath, a room that looks as though it has been hit by a blizzard of hot snow; whilst sipping orange pop, we bathe our tootsies in the under table foot baths in the café; I wallow in a glass-floored pool, underneath which swim a couple of small sharks (I’m not making this up). I long ago lost count of how many pools there are in the complex, there are even more of them if you pay extra to access the Balinese flower baths, but my favourite place is the Finnish Sauna, a Japanese-looking wooden building covered with pretend snow, which has a couple of plastic huskies on the roof. Inside, the sauna is brightly lit, hot as hell, is covered with white carpeting and has television screens embedded in the wall. There’s a gameshow on, so I sit and sweat and watch for a while.
Spa World is kind of crappy, but really good. The décor owes a lot to the powers of fibreglass and not very much to the reality of European spa culture, but that doesn’t matter. After feeling like an ape on the streets of Tokyo, it’s a relief to see naked Japanese women whose bodies represent the full spectrum of sizes and shapes. Even better are the fleet of massage machines outside the main bathing area, where you can get any bit of your body mechanically squeezed for 200 yen; or the toenail clipping station; or the amusements where you can play the drumming machine in your pink dress; or the plastic brushes in the changing rooms, for your exclusive use. |
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