When Sanjiro Minato, the owner of Sauna no Umeyu in Kyoto, asked me to illustrate a bath towel for his sento, I accepted, not knowing at the time that collaborating with sento would become such an important part of my life.

To design a bath towel was an amusing idea to me: as you enter the bath naked, it’s the only piece of cloth (and designable item) that you can carry with you inside the bath. I imagined people using it everyday, washing their naked bodies with it, putting the towel on their heads while taking the bath… I illustrated on it a psychedelic sento session, and then took some photos of it inside the bathroom.

As a foreigner visiting sento for the first time, some common things for a Japanese were extraordinary to me, for example: electric baths, pocari sweat, reading manga and drinking milk after the bath… Despite being a place of relaxation and well-being, the sento had a great number of rules you had to observe, like washing yourself before entering the bath, not speaking too loud in the sauna… That was also quite funny to me.
Whenever I felt stressed or tired, going to the sento would always refresh my mind and offer new ideas. I noticed that it wasn’t only a place for cleaning and relaxing yourself, but also a place of social bonding and artistic inspiration.

One day, while taking a bath at my local sento, an idea appeared to me: why not writing down all the things I noticed in the Sento, and creating a book about it?
I started writing, drawing, and went interviewing and photographing my friends working a part-time job at Umeyu. This resulted in YU&ME: a 112-pages Zine filled with sento notes, illustrations and photographies, kind of a little sento guide aiming to introduce the foreigner to the Japanese bathing culture with humour.

When returning to France after those six months in Japan, I printed and distributed a few of these zine. Surprisingly, they sold out pretty quickly. After this, a few years passed, and I really missed Japan – especially its Sento culture. That’s when I had another idea to return to Japan… To be continued.