Are there any scrubbing services in Japanese bathhouses?

Japanese bathhouses generally provide scrubbing services.

Structure of Japanese public bathhouse:

The bathhouse is divided into two. At the entrance, men and women go left or right respectively. Of course, you have to take off your shoes when taking a shower. In order to prevent theft, a shoe box is installed on the wall. In the past, the key to the shoe box was mostly a large wooden key.

After taking off my shoes and opening the door, I arrived at a large dressing room with a bath inside. There is a high platform next to the door where the bathhouse staff can sit. This platform is called "Bantai" (meaning duty platform). When the staff is sitting on the counter and charging, they can watch the dressing room closely to prevent thieves from entering and exiting, so that customers can bathe in a comfortable mood.

However, people sitting on the stage can see both sides at the same time. When Chinese students who came to Japan first went to sento, they were not used to taking off their clothes in the eyes of the opposite sex, but when they saw Japanese people, they were not used to it. I don't care, I'll get used to it gradually. Customers with valuables can use cupboards. There used to be wooden cupboards, but they have almost disappeared and have been replaced by metal cupboards.

The most eye-catching thing in the public bathhouse is the bathroom murals. Although there are various patterns, most of them are landscape paintings, especially Mount Fuji. The murals in Tokyo bathhouses are painted by experts, and the tiles are painted with scenery, stories, etc. Some bathhouses have a small Japanese-style garden outside the changing room. This is an original design to allow customers to enjoy their bathing time.

In public bathhouses, you generally wash your body and hair in a special area, and soap bubbles and towels are not allowed into the bathhouse. Even in the cold winter, if you want to soak in the bath first, you should rinse your body first out of politeness.

In order to make it easier to get in and out of the bath until you finish bathing, you can place your own basin and soap at the faucet. When walking around in the bathroom, both men and women use a towel to cover their lower body. This is a small concern that many people have when taking a bath together. If you borrow a basin or chair from a bathhouse, you should rinse it before returning it.

Extended information:

Precautions when taking a bath:

Don’t use too much force when taking a bath. From the physiological point of view of the skin, rubbing too hard when bathing is not only unhygienic, but also harmful to the skin. Everyone knows that there is a stratum corneum on the surface of the skin, and the cells in the stratum corneum contain keratin. It helps reduce water evaporation and even absorbs water to keep skin moisturized.

The stratum corneum generally ranges from 10 to 40 microns. Excessive exfoliation of the stratum corneum will cause the stratum corneum to become very thin, making the skin sensitive, and in severe cases, redness will appear.

The surface of the skin is the stratum corneum, which is composed of completely keratinized cells. Keratinocytes are formed by the continuous differentiation of basal cells, which gradually migrate to the stratum corneum through the spinous and granular layers. They are flat and have no nucleus, and they continue to disintegrate and fall off, forming the so-called "skin". The time of this evolution process is called the epidermal growth cycle, which takes about 3 to 4 weeks, also known as the epidermal renewal rate.

The stratum corneum, together with the epidermal lipid film formed by the emulsification of sebum and water on its surface, forms the topmost barrier protective layer of the skin and plays a very important role.

On the one hand, it protects various internal tissues and organs of the body from various damages in the external environment, such as mechanical damage such as friction, pulling, squeezing, and collision, and physical damage such as electric shock, light, and magnetic sound. Damage, chemical damage such as acid and alkali corrosion, especially the dense stratum corneum can effectively prevent bacteria and viruses with a diameter of more than 200nm from entering the skin.

In addition, the free fatty acids in the lipid membrane of the skin surface make the pH value of the skin surface acidic, inhibiting the growth of many bacteria, thereby protecting the body from microbial invasion.

On the other hand, the semipermeable membrane properties of the stratum corneum can well prevent the loss of nutrients in the body. Adults lose about 240 to 480ml of water through the skin every day, but if the stratum corneum is removed , the loss of moisture will increase more than 10 times.

It can be seen that when we use a bath towel to scrub the skin too hard, the keratinocytes that have not yet been fully keratinized are often peeled off prematurely, or even the stratum corneum is completely peeled off, revealing the bright red granular layer or spinous layer of skin. The barrier protective effect of the skin is greatly weakened, and the body is easily susceptible to various damages in the external environment, and it is easy to accelerate the aging of the skin in the long run, so it is best not to rub too hard when taking a bath.

Baidu Encyclopedia - Japanese Public Bathhouse

Baidu Encyclopedia - Rubbing Bath