Public Baths and Cats

I don't go to public baths all that often, but I love the very existence of them, and I've even had the fleeting thought that I'd like to be involved in running one in my retirement. Of course, I know full well that neighborhood public baths are being forced to close one after another and that the ones remaining are struggling to stay in business, so it's just a pipe dream.

There is an NHK program called 'Document 72 Hours' that features 72-hour fixed-point observations, and I watch it occasionally. The setting for the other day's episode was a public bath in Osaka. Housewives who come seeking a brief moment of solitude while being chased by housework and work, factory workers who stop by before their shifts, and elementary school girls having a sleepover party all come one after another.

At a public bath, for an affordable price, people of all ages and genders—whether they are scary-looking people with tattoos or ordinary people—all get naked, let out a sigh of relief, take off their personas for a brief moment, and then return to their daily lives. It's a different quality from 'relaxing at Starbucks' (I like going to Starbucks, so I'm not criticizing them). I think such places are truly important, or perhaps necessary, for human beings.

Cats are the same way. Why are people healed by cats? It's because it doesn't matter to them what kind of person you are. Your annual income, your profession, your job title, or the past you carry—none of that matters at all. To them, all that matters is whether you feed them, take care of them, and play with them. Perhaps people are healed because they can shed their personas and interact with them.

I remember the philosopher I like, Ken Nishi, writing in the afterword of his book 'Adventure from Existence' that he once suffered from the obsession that he 'must be someone.' Indeed, both public baths and cats are places or beings that 'accept you even if you are no one.'
In a sense, you could say that public baths are places where people troubled by 'form' can become 'void,' and cats are beings that help us become 'void.'
I have taken the liberty of interpreting the Heart Sutra's 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form' as meaning something like that.

That is why I like both public baths and cats. (I like dogs too, but the dogs I've interacted with so far only listened to me when I had treats, so I feel they have less of a 'void' quality than cats, haha.)