The Rise of Franken-Joel: Visiting a Sentō and Discovering the Denki Buro

When I was 17, I was–even by teenage standards–incredibly innocent and sheltered.

I’d still never been kissed, apart from a couple of times on the cheek many years before, and when it came to changing in the girls’ locker room at school, I’d mastered the art of taking one shirt off while putting another on.

Then, that summer, I traveled to eastern Europe, where I experienced my first Turkish bath, which we actually found in Hungary.

To say I was nervous would have been an understatement. Growing up in conservative southwest Florida, “purity culture” was still very much a thing. Nudity was, in my mind, something terrifying: a thing you did once you did THAT OTHER THING which, at the rate I was going, I couldn’t imagine I’d ever get around to.

But, according to the adults, Turkish bathhouses were a culturally normal thing and, while we were of course ALLOWED to bow out, we were encouraged to give them a try.

Clumsily, I covered myself in my towel and looked out among the various pools of water, and surveyed the all-female room, and I gasped.

These women were just….bathing. At every shape and size; every age and physicality, each woman in there was simply existing, unapologetically. It was there–among my female friends, my mentor’s wife, and my school librarian, that I learned to be comfortable while naked.

My body wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t the thinnest girl in the group, nor had I quite developed “up top” the way some of the others had, but it didn’t matter. For the first time, I saw nudity as something wholly natural: a thing that had been somehow taken away from me by my Catholic and Baptist ancestors. Nudity was a state of being…a confident existence I’d never had before.

I left the bathhouse a new woman, with an entirely new perspective on womanhood and the female bond.

So, 18 years later, when my friends and I stepped into a Japanese sentō–their equivalent of the bathhouses I’d experienced back in Hungary–I did so with complete abandon. I’d experienced this all before, in another corner of the world, and so it was, in a way, like coming home to something that had profoundly changed me as a young adult.

This time, I had a whole new thing to conquer.

To hell with nudity. I’d squared with that insecurity a long time ago. At 35, I was far from innocent and had taken my then-newfound respect for both platonic and sexual nudity with me when I’d returned to the states.

No. This time I sought out something I learned about on a hike two years ago: the rumored Denki Buros of Japan.

SO let’s backtrack again real quick, only this time we’ll only go back to 2020.

We were all in the middle of a pandemic and there wasn’t a whole lot for any of us to do. I’d just moved back to Orlando from Washington DC, and I was still going to school for software engineering and UX design. To wedge a break in all the monotony and studying, we used to “hike” out in an area near Lake Nona called Moss Park. It was more of a nature walk, but it was out in the fresh air and it allowed all of us to get some socializing and exercising in.

It had been a year since my friends Jeremy, Joel, and John had made their first group trip to Japan, and it was honestly all these dudes would talk about–particularly Jeremy and Joel, who fell in love with the place.

Of the many stories they told, the one that perked my interest the most was about the time Joel went rogue and wandered around in suburban Kyoto until he found what he was looking for: an authentic neighborhood Japanese sentō.

A couple of details about my friend Joel:

Joel is the oldest of three in a boisterous Scottish and Italian family. Even in his early 40s, he’s an excitable ball of energy. Joel is a man not easily lost in a crowd because the sheer vibrato of his voice would never allow it. It’s not so much that he shouts…his voice just carries.

Despite this, in calm and tranquil Japan, Joel has an earnest respect for the sensibilities of the culture. But he does get very, very excited about things…and he was positively STOKED to find this sentō.

So now let’s jump into what sentōs are and how they work.

Japan is a volcanically active country, making it home to about 25,000 hot springs. These springs provide hot mineral water to over 3,000 geothermally heated onsens, or natural baths. If you’re looking on a Japanese map, onsens are indicated with a ♨, or with the kanji word 湯, pronounced “yu,” meaning “hot water.”

A sentō is a man-made onsen. It costs ¥450 to get in, which converts to about $3, and it is a cornerstone of Japanese culture. On a near-daily basis, people will drop over at a sentō or onsen before going home. It’s a way to literally wash off the day, and we’re all pretty certain that this practice is one of the key reasons the Japanese live so long.

As an avid bubble bath enthusiast I’m completely with the Japanese on this: we would all benefit from a daily sentō ritual.

Each of the baths contains water of varying temperatures. Some are lukewarm, others are scalding hot. Then, as in the Turkish baths of my youth, you’ll find some that are positively frigid. These baths are just a degree or so above freezing and they create cold shock proteins that send your body into survival mode: quickly repairing itself more efficiently than it ever has before.

So, when Joel the Enthusiast went to his first sentō, he goldilocks’d that shit like a pro.

Some baths were so hot he thought his skin might blister–though, to his surprise–it didn’t. Others were icy cold, shocking his body and freezing him to the bone.

And then there was THE bath…the one that would shake him to his core…literally.

He towed his foot into this particular water with the learned hesitation from the last several baths–he knew, at this point, that he’d be fine, but he entered slowly just the same.

He said that, at first, he thought it was just really hot…only, after a moment, he realized it really wasn’t.

As he sank into the bath, he puzzled over it. There was a sensation he couldn’t quite put his finger on…it was almost like…movement. He looked around at the signs–all in Japanese–and tried to figure out what made this bath so odd.

And then he saw them: tiny lightening bolts.

This BATH WATER was pulsing with ELECTRICITY.

And Joel was still alive.

Toss every goddamn thing you’ve ever heard about electricity and water out the window for a second. Somehow, the Japanese have managed to defy all of it.

They’ve infused their bathwater with electricity and Joel says it’s the most amazing–electrifying (yes, I hate myself for that)–feeling he’s ever experienced in his life. In his words, “it’s like thousands of tiny leprechauns dancing on your body.”

When he got back to the hotel, Jeremy and John were exposed to a whole new Joel. Jeremy said it was like hooking Joel up to a car battery.

His energy became positively crackling. He was…ALIVE.

I paused in my hike when they described this.

“He became…Franken-Joel?”

“Yes!” Jeremy exclaimed. “Franken-Joel!”

The concept was harrowing, and yet–the more Joel went on about this experience–the more curious I became. He said it was more than just energizing: it was healing. It was better than any massage he’d ever had; the low-level electricity can affect headaches, nervous system disorders, migraines, arthritis, neuromuscular disorders, and more.

Terrifying as it sounds, the Denki Buro is a relaxation powerhouse, scrambling pain signals and targeting every muscle group all at once.

Since then, I have been both nervous and excited to find a Denki Buro.

So, Joel, Laura, and I went out of our way to find a neighborhood sentō.

Sentōs are divided in half by a tall wall. Women go to one side and men will go to the other. We walked up to the building and then Joel went to the right and Laura and I went to the left.

We paid for our baths and walked over to the locker area, where we stowed our backpacks and clothes. Then, a little old lady that helps run the sentō handed us a plastic bucket each and a plastic bowl to share with some shampoo and soap, along with small hand towels, called onsen towels. These towels can either be used for privacy or for washing your body.

From there, Laura and I walked into another room: the bath area.

Along the left side of the room was a wall that was lined with mirrors and water spouts about knee-high off the floor. Behind it was another row of spouts.

Laura and I watched women place their buckets on the floor in front of the water spouts and sit on them to begin washing off before using the baths.

Giggling to ourselves, we followed suit. Laura–Joel’s wife–is in many ways the yin to his yang. She is the sweetest, most soft-spoken person alive. She’s also a bit timid sometimes, though not closed off to new experiences, either. She grew up in rural Indiana and has a kindness about her that is positively lovely.

The harshest thing you’ll ever get from Laura is something we’ve all come to call her “gentle look of judgement,” a facial expression held only for the most extreme circumstance. If you receive Laura’s Gentle Look of Judgement, you’ve seriously fucked up.

So now take us–the female odd couple–and drop us into a Japanese sentō in suburban Japan.

Giggling away–one of us excited if not a little nervous, and the other cracking jokes–we took our seats at the spouts and began washing off our bodies. At one point, I slipped off of my bucket and landed squarely on my ass.

Recovering, I scanned the area, looking for lightning bolts, but I found none. While distractedly searching, I squeezed the shampoo bottle too hard, sending it flying across the room.

Ever the graceful dame.

After that, I decided that, to both my dismay and relief, Denki Buros must just be on the mens’ side.

The women in there were all Japanese, and not only because we were among some of the first American tourists to travel to Japan since the lockdown.

We’d gone out of our way to find a neighborhood sentō because we didn’t want a touristy experience: we wanted the real deal. As a result, we were the only Americans that had probably ever stepped foot in the place. To be honest, I think they kind of respected it, in an amused sort of way.

We were clearly clueless, but through demonstration, the women guided us through things despite the language barrier.

We walked over to various baths and tested the water with our toes. It’s sort of a free-for-all. You come up with your own combination of hot and cold and just cycle through it however you want. As with many things in Japan, the whole experience is very buddhist: you find your own approach and path.

The first bath we fully submerged into was fairly hot, but Laura and I both love scalding showers, so for us it was heaven. Think of a Jacuzzi filled with minerals that seep into your capillaries and just soothe the hell out of everything in your body. By this time in the trip, we’d walked close to 60 miles, up and down stairs and hills, so the therapeutic nature of this endeavor was MORE than welcomed.

From there, we found hotter baths, which Laura absolutely loved but I determined I could only handle in smaller spurts.

All was well until I approached a bath currently occupied by what I can only describe as our Japanese Godmother: the woman who seemed the most curiously amused by us, who hinted and pointed at things to help us out.

She immediately swiped my hand away from the pool. Shocked, I glanced at Laura. We didn’t understand until the woman pointed to my arm. I was wearing the locker key around my wrist.

That pool–which I almost entered wearing a metal key–was the fabled Denki Buro.

Our Japanese Godmother saved my goddamn life.

I took the key off, sufficiently freaked out, and dropped it over with our shampoo and buckets.

I turned to find that Laura had joined our “godmother.” Her expression was one of confused elation. “How is it?” I asked.

“I LOVE IT?!” Laura exclaimed, slowly deciding that her husband had not oversold his beloved shock bath.

Overcome with complete apprehension, I slid my right foot in up to my knee, along with my right hand.

Every single thing in my body started to jiggle. You remember that scene in Home Alone, where Marv gets electrocuted into a skeleton? That’s all I could think of.

“No! No, no, no, no, no.”

“What?” Laura exclaimed, laughing. “Ok, I guess it’s not your thing.”

“You freaking like this, don’t you?”

Laura, smiling, goes “I kinda do!”

I tried it again. “Nope. Not my thing. But you know what? Joel is right. It’s like thousands of tiny leprechauns.”

Laura laughed and said, “I know! He was totally right!”

Laura proceeded to dip back into the electric bath again, oscilating between that and the hot bath that I couldn’t handle. I went and found the icy bath and plunged into it up to my rib cage, surprised at how much more I enjoyed it this time than I had all those years ago.

The voice of my school librarian, Debbie Monck, echoed in my head: “You won’t be a real woman until you dunk into the ice bath, Kara!”

Yeah. That’s right: I was peer pressured by MY SCHOOL LIBRARIAN. And yanno what? It felt like a rite of passage at the time–I genuinely believed that I’d ascended in some way to the bolder version of the woman I hoped to be.

18 years later, I remembered it and laughed. Laura could have her shock bath–I had this.

We emerged from the baths after a while, thoroughly relaxed and refreshed. Through the dividing wall, we and the other women could hear Joel’s laughing voice carrying. The women giggled and looked at us.

“Yep,” Laura said. “He’s mine.”

We walked out and met up with Jeremy, who’d been off filming things in the neighborhood while we were all bathing, to find that Joel had somehow found the younger, Japanese version of himself: a kid in his twenties who was FASCINATED by Joel. They used Google Lens to translate back and forth to one another and, because of this newfound friendship, we all went out for late night sushi and beers at a local joint the kid and his friend frequent.

All of us sat on cushions and used the app to translate back and forth for several hours: an unlikely group of people who, without the sentō or modern technology, would have never met one another.

The local guys couldn’t believe that we all tried the Denki Buro–and they were endlessly impressed that Laura liked it so much.

One thing about that night stands out to me as both funny and beautiful:

The Denki Buro solidified it: despite their wildly opposite vibes, Laura is–in every sense–the Bride of Franken-Joel…

And he couldn’t be prouder.

Kara Adamo is a globe-trotting ex-bartender, booze nerd, and booze writer. She is the author of Fancy Grape Juice: De-Snootifying the World’s Snootiest Beverage; Artimals: Coloring the Whimsical Wild; and Brews & Hues: A Coloring Book About Beer. Adamo is currently a UX writer and UX designer. She is currently working on the 2nd edition of Fancy Grape Juice.