About that bath, you know, Americans tend to associate nudity with sexuality and are pretty prudish about bathing together. But once you've been to a public bath or maybe a hot springs bath in Japan, you get a different view. Not that you'd ogle people in the buff, mind you, but bathing together, like having your futon next to someone else's, doesn't have to have a sexual connotation.
These days, most communal bathing is sex-segregated, the product of Japanese accommodation to the prudery of the American Occupation, but where there are shared baths, it is quite relaxed. Oh, OK, you DO notice a nice body!
Which reminds me: Japanese homes are pretty small, and those paper thin shoji screens don't hide sights and sounds really well, so I quickly learned that useful custom of 'not seeing' and 'not hearing' things I wasn't meant to see or hear -- it's a sort of functional social thing; it would be awkward or embarrassing if all private acts were publicly acknowledged, so there is a polite fiction that you haven't seen something you weren't meant to see.
I like that; it's useful and smoothes over difficult things: we Americans could use a few polite fictions, but we always seem to want everything out there and accounted for!
