“People don’t forget to take their testicles with them when they go home” says sauna in explaining new policy.

Most of the posts made through the official Twitter account of Sauna Monkey, a sauna and bathhouse located in downtown Nagoya, are pretty mundane. There’s information about limited-time discounts, promotional events, and other little everyday updates. But on February 28, Sauna Monkey put out a much more unique announcement:

“Thank you very much for your continued patronage of Sauna Monkey. Based on careful consideration of hygiene factors, we would like to take this opportunity to ask that customers refrain from using covers for certain specific parts of the body, made of silicone or other materials, within the bath and sauna areas.”

Just what “specific parts of the body” are the covers in question for? The balls.

Pictured above are the colorful offerings from Tamamall, a Japanese company that offers what it calls “sauna-use male protective devices.” To brush aside the delicately worded descriptions from Sauna Monkey and Tamamall, these are silicone cups for men to rest their testicles in while in a sauna, so as to keep the sensitive skin of the scrotum off the heated surface of the bench that sauna users sit on (though officially Romanized as “Tamamall,” the product is pronounced　“Tamamoru” in Japanese, a mashup of the Japanese words tama (“balls”) and mamoru (“protect”).

Sauna Monkey’s rationale of banning the covers’ use for hygiene reasons had one Twitter commenting whether this meant that the management had judged that having silicone on the sauna benches is less hygienic than having uncovered testicles on them, to which Sauna Monkey replied:

“People don’t forget to take their testicles with them when they go home, or leave them on the rack. That’s why we came to this decision.”

So the problem here doesn’t seem to be the covers themselves, so much as that apparently Sauna Monkey has had to deal with people leaving their ball covers behind, meaning the cleaning staff has to pick them up and throw them away, or that customers have been leaving their covers on the common-use racks/shelves for personal items, where they’re a bit too close for comfort to other people’s belongings.

Just one day after Sauna Monkey announced the new policy, though, Tamamall itself tweeted back a question in response, asking:

“The sauna mats provided by sauna facilities, as well as customers’ own personal sauna mats that they bring, are also in direct contact with the user’s private parts, and are left on common-use racks. Please explain the rational difference between these and Tamamall. Isn’t it an overly strict policy to ban a specific product at a stage where no concrete negative effects have occurred?”

Despite the aggressive tone of Tamamall’s question, Sauna Monkey replied that it could see the validity of it. To clarify its position, Sauna Monkey explained that sauna mats and towels do come into direct contact with one’s private parts, they don’t have the purpose-built design of holding just the balls. As such, there’s a greater likelihood of customers finding the sight of testicle covers lying around the facility to be “psychologically uncomfortable,” or, in more visceral terms, just plain gross, and this, more so than scientific hygiene concerns, is the primary reason for the policy. Aside from Tamamall’s, the majority of the reactions to Sauna Monkey’s tweet about the ball cover ban have been in support of it, so it seems as though the management does have a pretty good sense of what its potential customers would find icky.

However, Sauna Monkey isn’t opposed to ball covers on a conceptual level, and in its response to Tamamall’s query said that they think their design is excellent, and that customers are welcome to use the covers in the facility’s private saunas (so long as they remember to take them home when their session is done).

In addition to Sauna Monkey, Sauna Tokyo, located in downtown Tokyo’s upscale Akasaka neighborhood, has recently enacted a policy banning the use of testicle covers too. A commenter replying to Sauna Monkey’s announcement said that a number of saunas he’s recently visited had similar rules, so if you’re headed to a sauna and planning to plop your boys into a cup, it might be a good idea to check what the house rules are first.

Source: Twitter/@SAUNA_MONKEY_, Twitter/@tamamall_sauna, Chunichi Sports
Top image: PR Times
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