WEBVTT

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Well, I'm going to read
some poems next that

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belong to Japan, more or less.

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"Yase-- September."

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Yase is a little village north
of the old capital of Kyoto

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at the foot of
the mountain where

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I lived for about a
year and a half once.

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"Old Mrs. Kawabata cuts
down the tall spike weeds,

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more in two hours than
I can get done in a day.

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Out of a mountain of
grass and thistle,

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she saved five dusty stalks
of ragged wild blue flower

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and put them in my
kitchen in a jar."

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This poem, or little
group of poems,

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is called "The Public Bath."

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Maybe some of you saw
this in Evergreen Review

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a couple years ago.

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In any Japanese
city, if you walk

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10 minutes in any
direction, you're

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bound to stumble on a public
bath, a very convenient

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institution.

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You can get in and
stay in as long as you

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like for about five cents.

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Now, up until about 1868 or
so-- maybe later, about 1880,

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I guess--

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the sexes were not segregated
in Japanese public baths.

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And it was only to
please what they thought

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would be more civilized
mores of the Western world

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that they began
erecting partitions

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down the middle of
the public baths

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so that the woman went on one
side and the men on the other.

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However, they never bothered
to send children, particularly,

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to any one given side.

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And also, as it
happens, the area

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where you dress and undress is
not particularly segregated.

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[LAUGHTER]

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I went many hundreds of
times to the public baths,

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and so I was able to
distill these six or seven

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little [INAUDIBLE].

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They're very short.

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The first one is
called "the bath-girl."

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"Getting dressed in the
mirror, the bath girl

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with a pretty mole and
red skirt is watching me.

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Am I different?"

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[LAUGHTER]

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