Bathtime

[Peter H]

The History of Modern Japanese Education,Benjamin Duke,page 333,bathing at Military Schools:

Even the bath,of great importance in Japanese custom,was employed as a discplinary instrument.The accepted procedure calls for the bather to wash thoroughly outside the bath itself.Only then does one immerse the body into the clean bath water up to the neck.All bathers immersed themselves in the same bath water each day.Junior students..were at the end of the line.Seniors bathed in the prefered fresh water...Others that entered the bath last were those under disciplinary action...

In the field:

[hisashi]

doramukan buro (ドラム缶風呂 = oil drum bath) was common in WWII battlefields and it existed long after the war for poorly equipped housings in rural Japan. Even today we enjoy it mainly at camping.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=312QCMOxBVs

[Peter H]

Barracks postcard,communal bath.

While Western armies wouldn't push this type of thing from a Japanese perspective it showed the health and virtues of military service.

[Peter H]

Japanese comic postcard

[Peter H]

I think this is the same type of vessel,bath here.

[Peter H]

In the field again

[Sewer King]

From another thread:

Editors of Time-Life Inc, Prelude to War, a volume in their “World War II” series (Time-Life Books, Inc, 1977), page 142-145

On a troop transport bound for Nanking, a Japanese soldier gives his comrades an impromptu shower by splashing them with a bucket of water. For the fastidious Japanese, who were accustomed to regular baths, a chance to clean up was a coveted rarity during the war in China.

The bather at right wears a yosegaki as a headcloth. Dust and mud were as typical of the China war as that in Russia. There, baths like this may have been rare enough -- and maybe laundry even rarer? The likeliest I can picture is for the troops to bathe in streams or ponds at best.

=============================

In the Imperial Navy bathing could also be made a disciplinary matter, as mentioned in Russell Spurr’s book A Glorious Way to Die (Newmarket Press, 1981), a dramatic account of the Imperial Navy’s “Last Sortie” from both Japanese and American viewpoints. It centers on Yamato, and mentions bathing aboard that legendary battleship from the experience of one of her AA gunners, Kobayashi Masanobu. From page 78:

Masanobu Kobayashi was looking forward to his bath. He would need it after completing his chores on the deck of Yamato. He loved to relax each evening in the 30-foot tub full of steaming water assigned to his division. The designers had thoughtfully provided 20 of these very Japanese installations on Yamato. Bathers washed themselves clean just before sinking into the water and quietly unwinding. It was just like the village bathhouse back home, except that there were no women. Sometimes the young seamen fooled around; tying a towel around their heads and sticking a lump of soap in it, they swam about the bath in line, with only the soap protruding above the surface. They called the game “submarines.”

The bath master waited patiently for them to finish. As they climbed out he charged each man a few sen for a clean towel and a bucket of fresh water. The bath itself was filled with heated seawater which left the body sticky unless you doused down afterward with fresh water.

“Hey, you!”

A petty officer awoke Kobayashi from his reverie. He scrubbed the deck with renewed vigor. Any sign of slacking could earn him a boot in the ribs. Superior officers never hesitated to slap or kick errant juniors. Worse still, he might be taken off tonight’s bathing roster. Section chiefs had a nasty habit of grabbing you just as you were about to put your feet up and demanding an instant, word-perfect recitation of the Emperor Meiji’s Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors. “If the majesty of our Empire be impaired, do not share with us the sorrow …” Everyone had to know it by heart because it was, in effect, the oath that bound them all to die, if necessary, without question at the Emperor’s command. Those who fumbled their words got no bathing either.

Yamato was such a technical marvel, it is a pity that there seem to be almost no pictures of her below decks. It was said that officers might take more than an hour to make inspection rounds there, while new sailors often easily got lost making their way about as well. Each of her ordinary seamen had as much as 3 square meters of bunk space and storage while many compartments were air-conditioned –- though likely out of necessity. Spurr makes tantalizing mention of her efficient galleys and their abundant menus, all these things explaining why she was envied in the fleet as “Hotel Yamato.”

I cannot know, but I imagine that her bathhouses were laid out and tiled much like ones ashore. Though the author does not claim it, were the Yamato-class ships the only ones to have such baths? Or maybe only they had ones that were so well-appointed?

One of the compelling parts of Spurr’s narrative is his many passing mentions of wartime life in just enough detail to strike the reader, but which were simply a part of their place or time. They do not simply give you the viewpoints of a Japanese sailor on board his ship, a dug-in defender at Okinawa, an American aviator making his attack run, or the admirals behind all of them. These are all put in understandable but dramatic context.

We all know very well what happened to Yamato, but Spurr conveys a great deal of the carnage and terror on her decks during those moments for gunner Kobayashi and others. And Yamato’s AA gunners were especially attacked by strafing US fighters to clear the way for their bombers. The bathhouse glimpsed earlier returns in that awful context (pages 274-275):

… Bullets clanged off the gun shields; the middle part of their triple [25mm gun] mounting ceased firing –- a recoil spring was shot away –- and Kobayashi felt a stinging blow on the forehead. His eyes filled with blood. He groped around for an emergency dressing to bind the wound and found a 6-inch metal fragment lodged in his brow. He eased it painfully out, releasing another spurt of blood, and thanked his sacred luck. It must be the amulet he was wearing from the village shrine. Given a trifle more momemtum, that chunk of jagged metal would have taken the top of his head off.

His friend Karuma, loading [the AA gun] at his very elbow, had also been hit. He lay on the bloodstained deck looking very pale. A bullet had shattered his right thigh. An artery must have been severed; he was rapidly bleeding to death. Kobayashi rigged a rough tourniquet and helped him down the gun-tub ladder and into the amidships casualty station. The below-decks companionway was crowded with limping, bleeding, vomiting men, converging in eerie silence upon the medics. Men already on the litters awaited their turn in stoic silence. The only sound was the snip of scissors and the slow shuffling of wounded feet.

Kobayashi tried to grab the attention of a doctor. There wasn’t one to be seen: only overworked medics in blood-spattered rubber aprons. They scarcely glanced at Karuma. A senior medic glared at Kobayashi.

“Get back to your gun, sailor,” he said. “This man’s dead. Drop him out there …” He nodded toward an open door. It was a bathhouse. Orderlies were throwing the bodies into the great hot water pool where he and Karuma and the other young gunners had once played “submarines.” Now it was choked with floating bodies, jostling gently against one another with every gyration of the ship, some seemingly untouched, many dreadfully mutilated, suspended in a still steaming bath of blood.

The literal butchery of modern war is well-enough known from many sources. But the myriad deaths aboard a burning and sinking warship might not be shown or told as often as it is in on land, or even in the air. By way of Spurr, Kobayashi’s account is more jarring for a such a fond place to become an abattoir.

-- Alan

[Eugen Pinak]

Though the author does not claim it, were the Yamato-class ships the only ones to have such baths? Or maybe only they had ones that were so well-appointed?

No - all IJN ships from destroyer upwards had such baths.

[Peter H]

When baths are not available

[Sewer King]

all IJN ships from destroyer upwards had such baths.

Thanks Eugen. I thought to look up some of this

A deck plan of heavy cruiser Myoko in 1941, showing bath spaces forward for officers --


-- and aft for the crew.

(all from Lacroix and Wells’ Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War (Naval Institute Press, 1997), pages 270-271)

Maybe there was another crew’s bath or baths on another deck? Modernization of the Myoko raised her complement to 970 officers and men, while equipping her to serve as a fleet flagship. Yamato had twenty baths for a complement of some 2,500, but I can't estimate any particular proportion of baths to crew numbers and watches on board the smaller, older, and different warships.

Supposedly a reference book was under consideration for the IJN’s powerful destroyer fleet, similar to Lacroix and Wells’ Japanese Cruisers. Their internals would also be as interesting. But if such a book was on the same scale as the earlier one -- and if it could be done at all -- it might have to be several large volumes long.

How about bathing on board Japanese submarines? I have seen the pictures of German U-boat crewmen improvising a bath from the hot salt water of diesel engine coolant, although for a wash only and not the soak of Japanese custom. Was there something similar in the IJN boats?

-- Alan

[Peter H]

Small bath

[division azul]

lol,the baths really were very small,who would fit in there now a days?

[donsor]

I was a toddler in Manila, Philippines when the Japanese occupied the country. During the period when US forces were making advances from the North our house and several others in the vicinity were occupied by Japanese soldiers and Korean sailors. Eighty soldiers occupied my house while the Korean sailors (probably with the Japanese Navy) stored eighteen torpedoes in a house across from mine. After three days and two nights the entire group shipped out to reenforce their garrison in Leyte. Nonetheless, I lived two blocks from the University of Sto. Tomas were all US citizen civilians were intered. On the subject of bathtime, I used to watch the Japanese soldiers bathe using 55 gallon drums filled with steaming water. Several use the same water according to rank. As many as four or five will use the same water before replenishing it. They did not have any latrine so they peed and defacated anywhere they felt like.

[Peter H]

From ebay,seller wwkochan