Yoshiko Kodama’s family has run a traditional public bathhouse in the mountainous town of Nagano, Japan, for 138 years.
The company has survived several world wars, five emperors and three cataclysmic earthquakes. But the conflict in Iran threatens to bankrupt its sento, as Japanese institutions are called.
Heating the water that flows from Ms. Kodama’s taps requires up to 2,000 liters of heavy fuel oil every month. And soaring oil prices resulting from the war have left Ms. Kodama, 87, uncertain about how she will be able to continue operating a business she was already struggling to keep afloat.
It’s one of many – and growing – ripple effects from decisions made in Washington, Tel Aviv and Tehran that are reverberating across the world. “If oil prices continue to rise, I will really have to stop,” Ms. Kodama said.
For nearly a millennium, sento have been a social anchor in Japanese life. At these neighborhood facilities — often marked by iconic indigo curtains adorned with the Japanese character “yu,” meaning “hot water” — residents pay a few dollars to wash and soak in communal tubs.
But the industry has declined in recent decades, weakened by a chronic shortage of successors, an increase in private baths in new homes and competition from modern, well-equipped spas. Now, rising fuel prices threaten to push the few remaining operators to the brink.
Ms. Kodama has run her family’s public baths for more than six decades. Every day, at 1 p.m., she walks down a narrow, cobbled alley to the boiler room to turn on the oven. Around 2 p.m., she is at the taps and fills the common bathtubs. Around 3 p.m., when the water has cooled to just over 104 degrees, his customers start arriving.
Ms Kodama said she had never faced such tension. “It’s worse than the oil shock,” she said, referring to the energy crisis of 1973, when an Arab-imposed oil embargo sent prices soaring and changed the share of global energy consumption.
In the mid-20th century, most sento switched from wood-fired boilers to gas and oil-fired boilers. In Tokyo, public baths tend to use city gas, but for regional sento, oil is the norm. Since the war began nine weeks ago, oil prices have soared, pushing up costs by up to 50 percent for public bathhouse owners, according to the Japanese National Sento Association.
Carriers face unique limitations when trying to pass on higher costs to their customers. Historically, these public baths were designated as essential infrastructure for people without private baths. Because of this heritage, sento are still classified as public welfare services, with prefectural governments capping entry fees at around 500 yen, or about $3.
Some operators charge below the cap, fearing undermining the sento’s more recent role as a social lifeline for Japan’s isolated elderly. For this aging population, now the industry’s primary clientele, public baths are as much a place to gather and socialize as they are a place to swim.
Even before the war, Mrs. Kodama made no profit, but kept the baths open out of a sense of duty. She welcomes a dozen customers a day, most of them in their eighties. Many live alone and communal bathing is their only social interaction of the day, she said.
One of the regulars is a 92-year-old retired teacher who walks 20 minutes most days to the sento and enjoys debating politics. To keep up, Ms. Kodama said, she watches the news daily to keep her topics of conversation fresh.
Today, rising fuel prices have transformed this commitment into an impossible equation.
“I’m a bit of an idiot” for remaining open, Ms. Kodama said. “I feel sorry for my customers. There are people pushing the walkers to come here. But I pay for this place with my own pension,” she said. “I’m okay with volunteering, but I can’t continue doing volunteer work that I’m losing money on. »
Throughout Japan, cases like that of Ms. Kodama are increasing. In recent weeks, a multitude of public baths have temporarily closed their doors or reduced their opening hours. Shinichi Uno, executive director of the Japanese National Sento Association, estimates that a fifth of the country’s operators have taken such measures since the start of the war.
Even before the latest energy disruptions, sento were disappearing from Japanese neighborhoods. The number of bathhouses owned by the industry association has dropped to 1,493 this year, a small fraction of the 18,000 that operated at the industry’s peak in the late 1960s. For decades, the facilities have been disappearing at a rate of about 4 to 5 percent per year.
The fear is that the surge in inflation will accelerate the decline. Older owners who had planned to continue working for another five or 10 years might simply “lose heart,” Mr. Uno said. “Their motivation is undermined. I’m very concerned that more and more people will decide to close their doors early and go out of business.”
For a business like Ms. Kodama’s, the decision to close would most likely mean the end of the family legacy. None of her three children are willing to take over the business after retirement, she said.
What comes next for the industry is unclear. At the end of March, more than 60% of sento operators reported a decline in activity, according to a survey published by data provider Teikoku Databank.
Beyond the higher cost of fuel, which typically accounts for 30 to 50 percent of sento operators’ costs, “we see situations where fuel simply cannot be purchased at all,” said Daisuke Iijima, an analyst at Teikoku Databank. The most concerning thing for homeowners, he said, is “the fact that this energy crisis does not appear to be temporary.”
Supporters are calling for emergency grants, while some government officials argue that public funds should not be used to prop up businesses already in irreparable decline.
Ms. Kodama and other operators have been pushing to raise price caps. But many of his peers are resisting, fearing that their clientele – already crushed by pensions that haven’t kept pace with inflation – will simply stop coming.
Last month, the national Sento Association called on the government to help secure oil supplies and subsidies for struggling public baths. He also urged officials to give local bathhouses more flexibility to raise their prices as energy costs rise.
For Sam Holden, an American researcher in urban studies in Tokyo, the value of sento cannot be measured solely by economic criteria. In 2020, he co-founded Sento & Neighborhood, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the revitalization and preservation of these facilities.
At their peak in the 1960s, sento functioned as “central nodes” within neighborhoods and local economies, Mr Holden said. Much like public parks in American cities or the piazza in Italy, public baths served as anchors for social activity and local commerce, with barbershops and grocery stores springing up around them.
“A lot of people have lived in the neighborhood all their lives, and the bathhouse is a place they still go and communicate on a daily basis,” Mr. Holden said. “In an increasingly solitary society, there is still a very good reason to support them, to try to preserve them.”
