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Queer Activity Hierarchy and The Full Denny’s Set

Surrounded by gracious fragrance, warming your body slowly

B R

05 May 2023 — 5 min read

17 April 2023

So the day before last I met two guys at the Aiiro Cafe, their names were Jason and Chris. Chris expressed interest in visiting an onsen - a traditional Japanese hot spring oriented spa - and it was on my list as well. Always on the lookout for a temporary traveling buddy, I took him up on the offer to join him.

We chose Thermae-Yu - recommended by Lonely Planet and close to where we were both staying. Upon entering, you drop your shoes in one locker (for sandals) and after paying for entry - I think it was like $30 - you then left everything in another set of lockers.

When I say “everything” above, I mean quite literally all of your bags, wallet, and clothing. You are given a bag with towels, a traditional robe, and a waterproof wristband. The wristband is used for opening your locker and purchasing anything in the facility.

Chris is a fairly handsome man that was about to turn 40 in a couple of weeks, but other than the fact he just ended a very long term relationship and lived in a relatively rural part of Australia in a community with a much older population - I didn’t really know anything about him.

But in short order we were nude in the spa area of the facility.

I’ll be borrowing liberally from the website of the facility because - as you might expect - taking photos in this area was both (1) wildly prohibited and (2) impossible anyway, as I had relinquished my cell phone.

But so was everyone. I was hoping to get to know him more via conversation, but as it turns out, talking is also prohibited. Or firmly discouraged. It was not clear which.

I haven’t been in these kinds of places with any frequency but I’ll mention the stuff I found novel, weird, or simply interesting.

The water being from an actual natural hot spring is important enough that this facility - dead center in the middle of Tokyo - *trucks it in every day*.

Heavily advertised are the baths that use “neutral electrolyte” water. I guess it’s got what skin craves?

There is a dry sauna (pictured here) and the non-dry (moist?) variety. I could tolerate these only briefly - both due to the heat and the Home Shopping Network equivalent being watched on the television - before jumping into a cold bath. Which was near freezing. I went back and forth for a while.

Okay this was the best one. You literally just lay down and take a nap. Only about half your body is submerged, but the water is warm so - at least on the day we were there - it was the perfect combined water/air temperature. Utterly relaxing. If I lived near one of these I would be there every week.

Just outside the spa area proper. I used everything in here somehow.

A notable feature at this facility is the shower area just within the spa area and (pictured above) another just outside of it. Between these, you have everything you could want from a really nice hotel bathroom - fully featured shower stalls; low level with seating, shaving cream, razors, toothbrushes with toothpaste imbued in them, hair dryers, product, and on and on.

I feel it’s possible that the services here belied the necessary and intentional limitations in standard living spaces in a tremendously crowded city - consider you might live with quite a few people in very cramped quarters. My rented living space is basically a filing cabinet with a loft bed. If that at all typical, you absolutely would want some more space of the bathing variety. I’ll say that as part of a family that had to go to the YMCA when we didn’t have a sufficient bathing/shower room available where we were living for a time (we weren’t destitute, but we certainly didn’t have a lot of money) I can relate a bit.

Another thing this facility affords is a place to just chill:

The place I am renting doesn’t have a *chair*, and definitely doesn’t have room for a whole recliner like this.

The other thing this place has, of course, is pseudoscience. If you happen to believe that lying on heated germanium rocks helps heal chronic fatigue, or perhaps if you are an ignorant tourists who does not understand what the upsell was downstairs, you can find yourself in a floor that is otherwise restricted from other patrons with rooms name “Neptune” and “Hercules”.

I don’t know what I was expecting but it was something beyond what amount to basically more saunas.

We stayed for a good two hours at Thermae-Yu. You can basically stay until they close at 2300, but by this point we were starving and the on-site restaurant looked boring. After an unreasonably cheap meal of katsudon and noodles in a broth, Chris invited me to go antique shopping with him.

Frankly, in my mind, this - two queer men going antiquing - is easily the gayest possible activity he could have suggested. Actual gay sex would might be lower on the scale. Also more fun. But I had already discounted that as an option; being an immediate one-off rebound to someone fresh (days!) out of a very long term relationship didn’t feel terribly ethical or appealing. Also: I have no idea if he was really interested. I’m kind of daft on this sort of thing. Incidentally, baking a quiche for another man on your second date (guilty) comes in third by in this hierarchy, in my reckoning.

So of course I said yes.

And a good thing I did, because while we did eventually find an antique store and it was fine (eh) we also got lost in a department store and found all kinds of fascinating shops. The most notable thing was the biggest gacha (or rather gachapon) store I have ever seen.