HOW THE WORLD BATHES

Hawera Star, Volume XLVI, 28 August 1926, Page 11

HOW THE WORLD BATHES

Each country has its own ways of bathing (says' a. writer in the Manchester Guardian). The French distrust the sea. Mot content with not allowing pleasure boats on the beach, they officially herd the bathers into small areas, under the masterful supervision of an official with a squeaky brass horn, which, he toots with frenzy when anyone swims out of her depth. Heaven's, how cold the Baltic is! Hundreds of times have I bathed' in it, after a month of glorious hot sun, and never without remembering its ice-bound winter. The Swedes and the Finns, the Estlionians and the North Russians do not care; if the bathing is good enough for a. Polar bear it is good enough for them, they declare. 1 shall never forget mv first bathe in the South Sea isles. It was on that song-famed Beach of . Waikiki, round the hook of the bay from Honolulu. How pungent the smell of the seaweed in that water, how entrancing the long, lazy emerald rollers, that came slouching in; they rose 1 , rose, tottered and magically vanished' around one in a smother of iridescent bubbles. Just behind me was the little plank bungalow under the rustling palms where Stevenson used: to write, surrounded by his toys, and cussing the landward breeze that would keep blowing lii's sheets of manuscript about. I liad a job to find the place. The policeman I questioned about this holy ground had never heard of “R.L.S. ” He thought’ I meant one Stevenson who was eondlueting' a fruit store in Honolulu., . . “Oh, a writer,” he said, idly swinging his club; “ain’t no writers located aroun ’ here, I guess,” and added that only Honolulu’s rich and respected business men could afford to. locate around a high-class residential neighbourhood like this. Real estate, lie amiably confided, came a good deal higher about here than “them writing boys kin pay.” But. underfoot, the beach at Waikiki was sadly below expectations. I would not have minded—indeed, I would have been rather pleased—had I cut my foot on a branch of coral. But it will" knock the bottom out of Pacific

DIPS IN MANY LANDS

REVELATIONS IN JAPAN.

romance if I tell you point-blank that it was bits of broken beer bottle that I cut my foot on. The Japanese are the most pertinacious bathers on earth. We bathe merely for the fun of the: thing, but they bathe for the good of their health, which is not to sav that they do not thoroughly enjoy themselves over it. Everyone you meet is either just going to take some medicated bath, or has just come from one. So numerous are. Japan’s volcanoes and hot mineral springs that, for centuries they have exerted a great influence upon her.— : curative treatment of disease. Public baths in the cities are attended more largely, I should think, that those anywhere else in the world. There is nq annoying wait in the really Japanese hotels until you can get into the bathroom. Everyone, of both sexes, uses the same large bathroom, irrespective of how many bathers are there already. In the hotels catering for foreigners, however, there are separate bathrooms. No Japanese considers a bath an immodest proceeding. Your housemaid or eook will cruise through the bathroom on their lawful occasions with as complete a lack of interest in the fact that- you are busily tubbing yourself as they show if they pass you'while you are washing your hands under the spigot in the passage. If you want to know what a course of really hot baths are like you should visit a voleanoilank village such as Kusatsu, below Asam'a’s grumbling, ever-menacing *' crater, where a. hundred pilgrims take a. “lobster-boiling” course twice a day for «. month, in water that- eventually reaches) a temperature of 120 degrees Falir. You have, to stay up to the chin in it for five minutes, the bath master calling each slow-passing half-minute.

The Chinese, on the other hand, have not the bathing habit, which is a pity, as everyone who has been cooped, up with them, in hot weather will readily concede. It is an astonishing thing that in the course of considerable wanderings in China, and ManchuSia, I have never see a Chinese man, woman or child bathing in sea, lake cr ri ret.