Nijusseiki Yokujou
(20 century public bath)
There are not many Art Deco style
buildings that I found in Japan. Maybe there are, but I just don’t know which
one. One of the Art Deco that I found in wikipedia and I thought that is
interesting to me is Nijusseiki Yokujou in Tokyo.
The concept sento, public bath was
started in 1591, which people around the same nationhood take a bath together
and communicate each other. (men and women take separately) At old time, not
many people have their own bathroom in their home, so they go to take
commercial bath in a reasonable price. In the modern era, it cost as cheap as
$2-3. Ever since after the WWII, when Japanese society became more modernized,
people tend to have their own bath at their home or apartment, so there are not
much need of this kind of the public bath. Besides, Japanese Hot Spring Resort,
and commercial spa are still popular, especially during the cold winter time,
but they are more expensive.
The Nijusseiki Yokujou is an old style
public bath built in 1929. (There is no information who built.) Like some of
you might have seen from the Japanese Hayao Miyazaki anime, “Spirited Away”,
Japanese public bath from the same period was build commonly more Japanese
hotel-like style with a tiled roof. Around 1920th, they tended to
build more elaborated bathhouse, but in Japanese style. Unusually, this
Nijusseiki Yokujou bathhouse was built with Western style Art Deco style. As
seen in the photos, there are long arched windows, round windows. Tiling that
are used for outside wall is called, “Scratch tiling,” Literally, it is tiling
that has a lot of scratched pattern. There is repetitive patterned motif on the
outside wall and on top of motife, the wall is covered with Spanish tile, not Japanese
tile to match with the Deco style building. Even the chimney that always
attached with a public building looks as one of the ornament of the Streamline
style. I think the naming, “20th century” also means, the forefront, like new
fashioned public bath at the time.
Interior of the bathhouse, there are
bathrooms with bathtub with 23 tabs for water and hot water. The bathrooms are
covered with checker designed tiles on the floor. It is just a regular
bathhouse like any other ones, but there are curved geometric European designed
lightings on the wall by the bathtub.
I think it makes sense with Art Deco
bathhouse, because they used to heat up water with charcoal at old public
bathhouse. Charcoal could imply of the modern technology like a steam engine. Sadly, this Nijusseki Yokujou was closed
and demolished just on 2007, 12, 31.
