Tweet of the Week #59: Son Will Never Live Down This Bath-Time Story

Sharing the tub, sharing the love.

Yes, in Japan parents and children bath together fully naked.

And that’s culturally perfectly normal.

From a Japanese perspective, together tub-time is good for family bonding. As children grow older, they’ll start enjoying bath time separately. But the habit of sharing the splash can go till junior high or even high school.

Japan has a long tradition of communal bathing with onsenand sento. You can still find gender-mixed onseneven today. The perspective is daunting for foreigners who do not have a background of bathing culture, but as soon as they take the leap, many realize how liberating the experience can be.

Family bathing can also be attributed to the way Japanese bathrooms are built. The bathroom “room” is what we could call a spacious self-contained wet room where you can sing under the showerhead and splash around pretending to be a shark to your heart’s content.

Next to the room where the tub actually is, you’ll find the changing room. This is the place where you get dressed, brush your teeth and keep your beauty and care products.

Eh, not quite

In a short comic strip, freelance journalist @TKTKfactory shared a funny bath time story thanks to his 3-year-old toddler—the kind that’ll probably come back to haunt his son at every family reunion forever.

がりににビックリしたお

= A story about how I was surprised by my son after a bath

むすこが風呂上りおもむろにメジャーをりし= After his bath, my 3-year-old son slowly took out a measuring tape

ちんちん9cm = My willy is 9 centimeters (3.5 inches!)

ゴゴゴゴゴゴ = *ba bump ba bump ba bump*

息子よそれは9cmとわん= My dear son, that’s not 9 centimeters

You surprised me! And other useful Japanese (ad)verbs

The Japanese language has a particular (and nameless) category, or group, of adverbs with a similar pattern: four hiragana and a repeated consonant, ending in り.

Like びっくりin the tweet above, a lot of these adverbs can be coupled with the verb する (to do). With びっくりするleading the way, here are a few expressions you should know for Japanese everyday life.

*Both さっぱりするand すっかりするcan be used for the state you’re in after you get out of the bath as you feel both physically refreshed and mentally relaxed.

Vocabulary

風呂上がり	furo agari	after taking a bath, after one’s bath
息子	musuko	son
ビックリする	bikkuri suru	surprise
お話	o hanashi	story
3歳	san sai	3-year-old
おもむろに	omomuro ni	slowly
メジャー	mejyaa	measuring tape
取り出し	toridashi	take out
ちんちん	chinchin	willy (childish word)
それ	sore	this
言わん	iwan	don’t say (Kansai dialect)
がっかりする	gakkari suru	to be disappointed
ゆっくりする	yukkuri suru	take one’s time
さっぱりする	sappari suru	feel much better
すっかりする	sukkari suru	to feel refreshed

For more on learning Japanese