Sweating It
From Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens (2014)
Channel surfing a couple weeks ago on a hot, humid night, I was surprised at what I saw in an old Japanese film. Two workers were running and stopped along a narrow Tokyo street, sweat pouring off their faces onto their dripping wet shirts. What was surprising was less the melodrama than their profuse sweating captured so clearly by the camera.
Nowadays on current TV, you hardly see a drop of sweat. Cooks have dry white neck towels, lovers running through summer streets apologize at last without a hint of sweat and girls dancing in deodorant ads proudly display armpits dry as a desert. Even beer seems to dry up everyone’s sweat at sunny beach barbecues. Either they film all this in freezer lockers or they use computer graphics to remove all the sweat.
The gritty realism of those vintage black and white films showed real human bodies (and real human emotions) doing what they naturally evolved to do. Even the monsters sweated. The only sweat you see these days is the water radical on the left of the kanji for sweat. It’s strange since sweat seems as basic to the meaning of Tokyo summer as fireworks, cicadas and unagi.
It’s taken me a while to adapt to Tokyo’s summer sweat culture. The look of horror on my students’ faces when I used to come to class drenched in sweat clued me in to the status of sweat. Through the summer, I have four-shirt and even five-shirt days, continually shirking off a wet one for fresh dry ones I keep hidden in my office filing cabinet. Most people stop at a super-cooled coffee shop or wash their faces in the bathroom before anything important in summer. Sweat becomes part of the Tokyo summer routine.
On trains, people prefer standing to sitting in summer, just so clothes can dry off a bit during the ride. Tokyoites, ever polite and ever self involved, even stand in the open areas of trains when really dripping, so as not to make others uncomfortable and have room to dab themselves dry. Leaving a wet spot on the seat cover after sitting, apparently, is the height of public discourtesy.
Never having owned a handkerchief before coming to Tokyo, I now boast quite a collection. One friend confessed to owning 30-some handkerchiefs. With endless patterns, fabrics and sizes to choose from, handkerchiefs are both a good gift and a summer necessity. Like with shirts, I have two, three and even four handkerchief days. But no matter how expensive a designer handkerchief I have, or how many, I always feel just a little childish wiping off sweat, as if my mother should be there to help me.
Air conditioning is everywhere, but it hardly helps. For me, Tokyo’s extensive system of air conditioning freezes more than comforts. Tokyo’s sharp division between indoor ice-cold air con and outside steam-room humidity just confuses my body. I melt like chocolate then stiffen like ice cream, baffled by the sudden, repeated temperature shifts.
There are signs, though, that sweat may be making a comeback, if it was ever really gone. All over the city, young fashionable Tokyoites are paying good money for drenching themselves in sweat. Sweat is now part of the health craze. Hot yoga, still a Tokyo boom, is done in 40-degree rooms. The hot stone beds in Tokyo day spas work like human sweat pumps. In modern-day Tokyo, even sweating can turn a good profit.
Sweat is also kind of sexy. What could be more beautiful than glistening beads of sweat along the nape of a woman’s neck or across the puffy rise of her chest? The few moments of actual visible sweat on TV are usually let-it-all-out singers at the end of a concert. At beer gardens and sidewalk wine cafes, outdoor imbibers seem less inhibited about sweating than they once were. It marks intimacy.
There’s something disruptive about sweating that I really like. Like it or not, pores open with cooling and relieving (if a bit embarrassing) drops of sweat far beyond our planning and control. All the air conditioning in Tokyo, sheer designer fabrics, high-tech deodorants and gift handkerchiefs will never be enough to totally resist the onslaught of heat and humidity.
Sweat is really part of the pleasure of summer, a way of recovering and slowing down, and a way of being very humanly in your–often very wet–skin. While wiping themselves, people always seem on the verge of leaving aside their winter reserve and commenting to complete strangers, “It’s hot, isn’t it?” Just like they do in old movies.
