Soapland city struggling to scrub image squeaky clean

By Ryann Connell
April 26, 2005

Ogoto is the name of a small Shiga Prefecture town that almost invariably reduces most Japanese into a fit of giggles.

Situated alongside Lake Biwa, Ogoto is known as the Sacred Site of Soaplands, as it is home to 41 kitschy soapland brothels located within a very close proximity to each another.

But, says Weekly Playboy, Ogoto's status as the ultimate Japanese netherworld has now fallen by the wayside and it is becoming better known as a hot spring resort area for families.

The vast change in fortunes, the weekly says, was brought about by a rapid decline in the number of brothel customers.

"Ogoto was almost synonymous with soaplands at one time, but this was only really for about the 3 years from 1973 to 1975," a spokesman for the Shiga Prefecture Special Bathing Facility Association, the Ogoto soapland operators' union, tells Weekly Playboy. "After that time, new soapland towns popped up in Gifu and Kobe, which took the customers away from Ogoto."

Feeling the pinch even more than the brothels where workers turned themselves into human sponges to service customers were Ogoto's numerous ryokan, Japanese-style inns.

When men from across Japan started flocking to Ogoto to partake of its particular type of bathing pleasures, enterprising types started building inns and other types of lodgings directly across the main road from where the brothels were located so they could accommodate the men riding the testosterone-fueled boom-boom boom. But when Ogoto's bonking bubble burst, it was the new inns that copped the brunt of the downturn rather than the brothels that managed to scrape by.

"Ogoto's brothel heyday was really only a momentary phenomenon," Satoru Haritani, managing director of the Ogoto Hot Spring Tourism Union, tells Weekly Playboy. "But once it had this image of being a den of iniquity, women stopped coming here. We realized that we wouldn't be able to survive if the trend continued. And for about the past 30 years, we've been working hard to rid the image of Ogoto being a brothel resort."

Ryokan owners have tried various methods to lure women and families back to the area, including the construction of elaborate open-air hot spring baths that overlook picturesque Lake Biwa, providing hearty course meals packed with local beef specialties and putting on stage shows featuring costumed superheroes.

"We've finally managed to drag visitor numbers back up again. What's more, 60 percent of visitors coming here are women," Haritani says. "We've even earned a name as a fine place for school excursions. We've had over 20,000 students come to stay here over the past year."

Though Ogoto's more wholesome businesses may have finally succeeding in building up a name for the town as a healthy resort, inn owners still can't deny that most of their establishments are still located within 200 meters of the town's collection of soaplands -- hardly an advertisement for fine family fun.

Soapland operators say they're sympathetic to the plight of the inn operators.

"We've exercised considerable self-control to make sure we don't interfere in the inn owners' plans to develop Ogoto as a family oriented resort area," the spokesman from the soapland union says. "But we don't deny that not far from this resort are a collection of soaplands that may prove to be of use to some of its customers. We want to work together with these people to live harmoniously."

Haritani, however, is not interested in getting a helping hand from the brothels.

"We have no intention," he tells Weekly Playboy, "of asking the soaplands to do anything for us."

Mainchi Shimbun

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