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Hakusan-yu
is a real neighborhood bath: the dignified old gentlemen on his way
in asks you if it's crowded, the girl at the desk clips the toenails
of an old lady who finds it difficult to do it herself, and tots of
both sexes scamper naked and giggling current review and forth between
mother's bath and father's. It's a huge old rambling summer-camp of
a bath which has recently been indifferently renovated with varnished
pine and cheap tiles, but it remains unselfconsciously the genuine
article. It doesn't really matter that the sauna (300 yen on top of
the 350 yen basic price) is laid out awkwardly or that the cool pool
is only big enough for a single panting refugee from the sauna at
a time. The taki waterfall is heated (decadent, some think), there
is a serious electric bath (where you sit innocently soaking between
two electrodes while an electric current courses through your body),
and the large, landscaped, still-water rotemburo outside bath is open
to the sky. After the bath, armed with a beer from the shop just around
the corner, you can sit on the stoop and gaze out on the floodlit
moss garden large enough to walk in, waiting for your companion to
emerge, late as usual.
current review
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