Sauna Mother promises to provide the sense of calming security felt by a newborn baby.
A good sauna session should be refreshing, the sort of thing that lets you shed the stress from the myriad pressures and responsibilities of adult life. Ideally, you should emerge feeling reborn, and if you think the best way to do so is by recreating your time in the womb, and the immediate aftermath of your emergence. Tokyo has got a place for you.
Opening soon in the downtown Roppongi neighborhood is Sauna Mother, which touts itself as a place where you can “stop being an adult for two hours.” Rather than indulge in such grade-school level nostalgia as eating a bunch of ice cream or playing on a swing set, though, Sauna Mother takes customers all the way back to the prenatal stage of childhood. For example, instead of a regular old sauna, the facility has a Uterus Sauna, which reproduces the sensations of being in the womb through fleshy red lighting, muffled sounds, and a scent its designers say is evocative of the smell of a mother’s skin. You can even have your photo taken to be placed on your “rebirth certificate” that Sauna Mother provides.
Sauna Mother mercifully passes on reenacting the dramatic intensity of the birthing procedure itself, so after emerging from the Uterus Sauna you’ll proceed to the Newborn Bath, a cold-water bath meant as an allegory to the initial rinsing of birthing fluids off of a newborn child.
Subsequently, you’ll be warmed back up again in the Mother’s Lap Shower, for which guests are propped on a seat shaped like a woman’s torso and thighs.
Finally, there’s perhaps the most visually impactful part of the experience, the Mother Sofa, where guests are cradled, rocked, and watched over.
The first two parts of that come from a reclining sofa with carefully calculated contours meant to eliminate excess pressure on any point of the body while you lie there and the surface sways back and forth, at one of three selectable speeds, like a mother rocking her baby to sleep. As for being watched over…
…projected above you is the countenance of one of four motherly figures, either Izanami, the Shinto mother goddess, the Two-Dimensional Mother (who looks sort of like a Ghilbi-version of classic anime character Sazae-san), the Impressionism-inspired Art Mother, or the Mythology Mother.
The goal of all this, Sauna Mother says, is to provide guests with “the sense of security they felt as newborns,” which will have them feeling invigorated when their session ends. The possibility that this unique sauna experience will instead scare the hell out of people and leave them debilitatingly terrified is something the management doesn’t address in its promotional materials, but no one can accuse Sauna Mother of being anything less than upfront about what customers can expect, so the facility is unlikely to have any customers who are themselves uncomfortable with the aesthetics.
Sauna Mother says it’s on track for its grand opening at the end of this month, with reservations set to open through its website in mid-October. The price for a one-person, two-hour session is listed at 8,500 yen (US$54), but there are discounts for group sessions of two, three, or four people, or maybe they should be reffered to as twins, triplets, and quadruplets.
Related: Sauna Mother official website
Source, images: PR Times
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