Once a necessity, a trip to the bathhouse now offers a chance to relax in luxurious surroundings
By Suh-kyung Yoon/SEOUL
Far East Economic ReviewIssue cover-dated October 19, 2000
KIM KI WON is making his team sweat--literally. Instead of cooping team members up in a meeting room, the marketing manager at Seoul start-up Hi-Tech Media is holding a brainstorming session in a sauna.
"You think better when you sweat," says the 30-year-old manager, sitting in a cavernous steam room next to a baking slab of jade. "It also relaxes you and forces everybody to let their guard down so we can discuss more and work better together."
The team that bathes together stays together? Now there's a team-building exercise for the New Economy. But it isn't just the start-ups that are sweating in Seoul these days. Everybody from Japanese tourists to Korean ajummas, or housewives, government officials, and even the occasional fugitive are stripping down in steam rooms, whirlpools, spas and saunas throughout the country.
When the Chinese defence minister visited South Korea for the first time last year, top of his itinerary was a soak in a public bathhouse with the Korean foreign minister--what the press dubbed "spa diplomacy." But bathhouses aren't always the scene of mediation. When a government official charged with corruption jumped bail and disappeared earlier this year, police were ordered to search all public bathhouses in his neighbourhood. The official had a cleanliness habit, soaking in the sauna at least once a day.
The revival in popularity of bathhouses comes despite a decline in their traditional role. Up to about 20 years ago, the lack of indoor plumbing meant most Koreans had little choice but to go down to their neighbourhood mokyoktang, or public bathhouse, every few days. There, they would wash up, relax and catch up on the latest gossip. Bathhouses were also everybody's favourite neighbourhood watering hole.
But as more and more Koreans moved into modern apartments and homes in the 1980s and 90s, public bathhouses started going out of business. "Why would anyone go all the way to the bathhouse when they could easily shower at home?" says Kim Soo Chul of the Korea Bathhouse Industry Association. "People just stopped going." And even today, bathhouses are still closing. Kim says more than 100 old-style bathhouses, or around 5% of the total, have shut down this year in Seoul alone.
But some bathhouses have managed to buck the trend by going upmarket, becoming everything regular showers and baths aren't--bigger, better, and more luxurious. Once simple showers-and-tub affairs, there are now multiplex mokyoktangs full of scented tubs (options include herbal, green tea, and germanium), a variety of saunas (wet, dry, salt, medicated), and a menu full of massages (exfoliating, aromatherapy, shiatsu). Many are outfitted with industrial-strength steam rooms, others have television rooms, communal sleeping quarters, restaurants and beauty salons. Waterpia, a giant wet amusement park in Kangwon province, is the biggest of the bunch. Its 10,000 daily visitors can choose from 15 different hot tubs and eight saunas.
Back in Seoul, the Hi-Tech Media group is sweating it out in a jade steam-room--the latest craze in saunas. Heated by a gigantic stone slab baked in an industrial-strength oven, the sauna is unisex so everyone is dressed in uniform white shirts, shorts and socks - all a bit sweat stained. Kim Ki Won and three colleagues are sitting and lying in one corner talking office politics. They've had a dinner of piping hot stew at the restaurant downstairs, and have spent an hour steaming themselves, cat-napping, watching TV, and bonding. "You can talk about things here that you can't really bring up in the office," says Kim Soo Jin, a 28-year-old marketing executive. "It's also nice to be able to relax with your colleagues without drinking."
As with most things, Hyundai Motors takes a more hard-core approach. At its factory in Asan, southeastern Korea, executives have started a ritual bluntly called "Let's Talk Naked." At the end of every month, the factory head and his team of managers host a different department to a meeting in a mokyoktang. Instead of drinking themselves under the table as they used to during their monthly meetings, the Hyundai men grab a quick meal and then head over to a public bathhouse, strip down and bathe together, talking shop and literally rubbing each others' backs.
For most companies, that's a bit too close for comfort. But many salarymen make a habit of going alone, usually to unwind after a tough day at work, but mostly when they can't make it all the way home after a late night in the office. Bathhouses are open around the clock and almost all have cable TVs and sleeping rooms. Some saunas now even offer laundry and ironing services for these stragglers. At many companies, sauna visits can even be put on expense accounts. Global Infosys, an Internet consulting firm, for instance, hands out four sauna coupons every month to employees as a bonus.
Some people come all the way from Japan to take a bath. Ayako Hasegawa, 38, drops in at Cheon Jin Yeon, a women-only spa, whenever she's in town. "We don't have these exfoliating services in Japan," she says, referring to the abrasive rub-down where you are scrubbed ferociously by middle-aged women wielding rough cloths. "I make sure to come whenever I can." More than half of Cheon Jin Yeon's guests are Japanese tourists. There's even a mokyoktang Web site for Japanese tourists--www. spa.infoweb.co.kr/spazone.html--that lists all the different saunas in Seoul.
Yet mokyoktangs remain a quintessentially Korean tradition. In recent years, especially in movies and TV shows, they have become a symbol of the close community bonds that are increasingly disappearing in modern cities. Nostalgia-drenched movies like Downpour Bathhouse and TV shows like The Men of the Mokyoktang Owner's Family have been huge hits, while a book from photographer Park Hwa Ya, Women Bathing, filled with pictures of her neighbourhood bathhouse, was published to much fanfare a few years ago.
For Koreans, it seems, the original function of the bathhouse may have been lost, but their appeal remains. "We find mokyoktangs liberating and cosy, not erotic or shameful," says Kim Min Jeong, a reporter for the Donga Weekly Magazine in Seoul. "Westerners don't understand that. Look at Psycho, Fatal Attraction--the bath is where murder or sin take place. But in Korea, mokyoktangs are where people can feel safe and truly reveal themselves to each other."
Hi-Tech Media's Jeong Jie Yoon, a 26-year-old marketing manager, agrees. For her, a session in the sauna is far better than being stuck in the heavily male atmosphere of a drinking party. "Something about sweating together makes you feel closer," she says dabbing a trickle from her brow.
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