With blistering temperatures over the past week and record cases of heat stroke, just getting around Tokyo for business or pleasure can leave you dripping with sweat and a little—okay, A LOT—stinky. It’s enough to make you want to bathe several times a day.
But what if you are dying to clean up but don’t want to go all the way back to your home or hotel? That’s when a cheap Japanese bathhouse, or sentou, can come in very handy. For a few hundred yen, you have a place to take a bath, grab a snooze on a bit of tatami, and put your game face on again. These little places used to be hard to locate, but as with most things these days, now there’s an app for that.
The free iPhone app is called Sentou Map Tokyo, and as the name suggests, it maps out the sentou in Tokyo. You can either search for the sentou nearest you by GPS location or search for sentou in a particular part of Tokyo. The app will list them up for you with the business hours, admission fees and holidays, though only in Japanese at the moment.
So far, so informative, but the really fun part of the app is collecting stamps from each bathhouse! The app has a function that allows you to check in at your chosen sentou and collect a “stamp”. You can compete with other users to get the most stamps, making you the “world champ” of bathing.
And you thought we were just joking when we said the Japanese love their baths!
Top image: Unmissable Tokyo
Screenshot: YouTube
[ Read in Japanese ]