Splish Splash

South Korea has a rich history and culture involving public bath houses.  Like a lot of interesting things about the country, modernity is killing many of them off:

"'We’re talking about the smaller bathhouses, the ones that we used to have just a few steps from our homes,' said Yoon Sung-yong, director-general of the museum in central Seoul. 'Growing up, going to public bathhouses was a special occasion, a stop we’d make especially prior to Chuseok [harvest holidays] or Seollal [Lunar New Year’s Day in Korea]. But with the franchise, large-scale sauna businesses taking over the industry and less people finding the need to bathe outside of their private bathtubs at home, smaller public bathhouses are closing down around us.'

From the late 1990s to today, around 3,000 public bathhouses closed down around the country, according to the museum.

'There have been studies before about how people practiced bathing regularly in the ancient times up to the Joseon Dynasty [1392-1910] and about the Japanese bringing their culture of public bathhouses into Korea during their occupation of Korea [1910-1945],' Yoon said. 'But the studies stop there. We decided to collect more recent records of public bathhouses and the culture built around them in Korea.'"

First off, I've never been to a jim-jil-bang myself.  Like most Americans (Westerners in general?) I grew up with pretty easy access to hot showers at home, or at a gym.  (Interestingly, one of the reasons public bathhouses became popular in the first place was to provide clean water to poor folks in order to fight cholera outbreaks.)  However, every foreigner in Korea knows that if you need a place to sleep off a night of drinking until the trains start running again, these are the places to go.

Second, our class got bogged down right away in the differences between public bathhouses and "saunas."  I explained that in English (via Swedish) saunas are steam rooms, not necessarily baths.  But if I understand correctly, Koreans would use the word sauna to mean something like high-end bathhouses, that often include attached gyms and health clubs as well.

But the students agreed that the small, local bathhouses that they grew up frequenting are now disappearing, and the higher-end, multi-service ones are what remain.