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The tub in my mother's house in Kyoto is deep enough to reach the collarbone when you sit, narrow enough that your knees stay bent, and it has never once been used to get clean. That happens first, on a low stool under a handheld shower, with a bucket and a washcloth and no vanity about scrubbing your own back raw. The bath comes after, when the body is already rinsed, and its only job left is to hold heat until the day agrees to let go of you.
I have been reading the English argument this week about whether a small bathroom should keep its tub at all, whether a shower, being more honest about square footage, should simply win. It is a fair question if a bath exists to get you clean. It is the wrong question here, where the room has never been asked to do that job, and where giving it up for efficiency would be like removing the good chair because the sofa already seats four.
A soaking tub wants to be built the way a hinoki one is: deep before it is wide, walls close enough to lean an elbow on both at once, water that reaches the collarbone rather than the waist. The wood is chosen for what it does wet — it softens, it releases a scent like a plane just cut, and after a year it darkens to the colour of weak tea. None of this is decoration. It is the room doing the one thing it was built to do, which is slow you down by half a degree an hour.
At a fair in Milan last spring I stood in front of a tub styled as a wellness object — a candle on the rim, a small wooden caddy for a paperback, water shown ankle-deep and lukewarm in every render. It was beautiful and it was for lying down, which is a different bath entirely, built for a body already relaxed rather than one arriving home still dressed in the day. I don't think either country has it wrong. I think we are answering different questions with the same word.
My mother's tub has a lid, cut from the same cypress, that goes on within minutes of the last person climbing out, so the water stays close to body temperature for whoever comes next. Four people can use one filling. Nobody has ever called this efficient. They call it the temperature the house is kept at, in the one room where nothing is expected of you at all.
Mio Tachibana was born in Kyoto, trained as an architect and left the drawing board to write about the rooms people actually live in. She keeps a 48-square-metre flat in Tokyo with one good chair and too many bowls, and believes a room is a decision about how you want to be tired at the end of the day.