This Week in Anime

When in Rome, Bathe as the Romans Do

Jean-Karlo
My heart goes out to our colleagues working on Preview Guide, they're definitely feeling the grind. I think we can all afford to take it easy and relax with a nice, long bath with the boys...

Thermae Romae is one of those weird concepts you could only really get away with in the world of anime and manga, a historical-fiction-slash-speculative-fiction story about an ancient Roman architect slipping through time to bring contemporary bathroom tech to the Ancient Romans. It shouldn't be as engaging as it is, and yet not only did Yen Press bring over the manga a few years back but it's had two animated adaptations—this one, Thermae Romae Novae, being the second one. And man, did this one surprise me!

COVID has no doubt complicated the animation production system worldwide, hence why there are so many CG scenes in Thermae Romae Novae, but I wanna second their creativity. Most of the CG is otherwise kept to crowd shots (animating the passers-by) or tricky rotation shots that would be a lot harder to do with traditional animation. It's a far cry from DRAMAtical Murder for sure. Pic related, it's DRAMAtical Murder.

I don't know how true-to-life the Roman obsession with bathing is, but the show claims that the first things many armies do while marching is construct a bath at the frontlines. With Lucius living in Emperor Hadrian's era of Pax Romana (a time in Roman history where they pulled back a little on bellicose conquest), the population seeks out comfort even further, giving Lucius plenty of opportunities to work. His problem when the show begins is that he loves baths a little too much: being inspired by the constructions his father and grandfather made, Lucius's traditional designs come off as dull and old-fashioned to contemporary Romans enjoying the influx of new aesthetics and cultures absorbed by Rome's expansion.

There's definitely quite a bit that's accurate to the era—like the Roman-era toilets and how they scrubbed themselves with brushes on sticks. Rome was no stranger to advanced engineering feats like aqueducts and heating, so it's not hard to buy into some of the other feats achieved in this series. But that nevertheless leaves poor Lucius in a bind: finding new, innovative bath designs for the spoiled Roman population.

There's no explanation for Lucius getting transported to modern day Japan, and there doesn't have to be because it's just hilarious to see a bunch of pruney old Japanese people nodding sagely at a temporally-displaced Roman and going, "Oh man, we got a poor foreigner here who's never seen a Japanese bath before. He's a real looker though, you could iron your laundry on those abs. Wouldn't mind that spread out on a cracker. He's a tall glass of water and I love moisture." Meanwhile, in a bit of extremely-era-accurate-but-nevertheless-politically-incorrect humor, Lucius is convinced that all of the "flat-faced" Japanese people he meets are slaves and deigns it appropriate for him to pick and choose the bits of their engineering that suit him best.

It's quite cute how so many of the Japanese people Lucius meets are simply pleasantly amused at this poor foreigner who doesn't speak the language. Also, being that he usually appears at bathhouses (with the exception of the time he pops up at a water park and a bathroom display store—we'll get to that later), not many people have to be freaked out about him being in the buff. As Terminator taught us, time travel has to be done in the nude.

It's also quite fortuitous that many of the people Lucius meets are of the older generation; many younger people in Japan are no doubt used to indoor bathing, but older Japanese people no doubt grew up in an era where many houses probably didn't have actual tubs or showers, leaving people to go to the local bathhouse for their bathing. There's a tradition that many younger folks probably can't appreciate; through Lucius, we don't just get to see how a foreign culture reacts to Japanese bathing, but we as an audience are able to see these old traditions kept alive.

Also, nothing to do with nothing but: I'm tickled pink by the Godzilla vs Hedorah poster in that one bathhouse. Also, Jaws and Enter the Dragon. Some old traditional place in Japan would definitely have movie posters from the 1970s up on the walls that haven't been taken down since they went up in the Nixon administration.

It's funny because Lucius thinks the mural in the bathhouse is Mt. Vesuvius when it's actually Mt Fuji! But we'll let him think he's still in Rome.

I love Lucius's attention to detail. He sees a cat-shaped shampoo bottle, he thinks, "Clearly, the cat shape is what brings the thing together!"—and so he recreates novelty toiletries in Ancient Rome. A pity he never discovered the rubber duckie.

What's sweetest about these segments is how much Yamazaki herself learns from her travels and how much it motivates her to potentially draw new adventures for Lucius! Yamazaki is a very curious person and it's just as fun seeing her experience all the lovely cultural aspects of Japanese bathing as it is to simply see them in action.

Again, there's definitely a spirit of wanting to keep these old traditions alive. There's a curious moment where Yamazaki discovers that water at a hot spring takes 30 years to travel through the ground, and another where she visits an inn that's over 100 years old. A lot of Japanese bathing itself feels like time-travel in its own way.

I was just amused to hear Tsuda's voice after his grave narration for To Your Eternity and him voicing a dog-boy in Sonny Boy. It's very amusing to hear him voice the comedically-unfunny Lucius, as well as his attempts at pronouncing Latin. Tsuda is really good at rolling those "R"s.

It's like The Hunt for Red October where Sean Connery and Sam Neill start speaking English when the camera zooms into their mouths. There is a gag in the manga that someone who is otherwise very passionate about Roman culture manages to learn Latin to communicate with Lucius, but this anime doesn't cover that part of the series in the adaptation. The most we get is a cute bit of bonding between Lucius and a young architect who is tasked with building a gaudy "Roman-inspired" bathhouse by a nouveaux-rich old man with more dollars than sense. The two bond over being hired by rich old men with absolutely no taste.

I'm getting ahead of myself, but the series ends with Livia reconciling with Lucius after the Roman Emperor Hadrian explains the importance of Lucius's work as an architect. Which... yeah, no. The series has Livia abscond to her parents' house because of how neglectful Lucius is, and even in the manga they divorce (the circumstances of Lucius' remarrying in the manga are hilarious).

Emperor Hadrian having a good head on his shoulders is noted often in the series; the Senate actively plots against him—and by extension Lucius—by virtue of being his favorite architect. Neither of Hadrian's heirs, Ceionus or Marcus Aurelius (seen in the series as a fifteen-year-old boy), are safe from the Senate, hence why Hadrian tasks Lucius with building baths in order to keep the peace. There's a bit where the Senate sends Lucius on a snipe hunt to bandit-infested territory behind Mt. Vesuvius (the series takes place a few decades after Pompeii is razed). After visiting a spa town in Japan, Lucius is able to help the bandits turn over a new leaf and found a thriving tourist town in the process.

Also, in what is a very Japanese bit of humor, manzai routines make it through to Ancient Rome! As seen with these two dorks who have a whole Abbot-and-Costello bit about the price of souvenirs.

The idea of Lucius ending up in the Edo period is making me want a Thermae Romae Novae/Doraemon crossover. I wanna know what Ancient Rome thinks of earless robot cats!

But I digress. Lucius also ends up at a Japanese waterpark and somehow avoids being put on a sex offender list for showing up naked at a public venue. It's a lot of fun seeing him presume the whole thing is some kind of weird training facility for children, to say nothing of how he manages to adapt it for the ancient Romans.

Oh geez, her. She'd just started at that job and her boss tells he to keep an eye out for an Italian customer due in at any moment. So she gives Lucius the royal treatment when he shows up... but once he vanishes, she just looks like she'd been goofing off all day. I can only hope the worst she got was getting written up...

Shout-out to the guy he fights, who apparently was an award-winning Russian fencer! Even going spear-and-board isn't enough to take him down.

Early on, there's also this elderly old man who struggles to bathe himself. Confusing Lucius for a caretaker, he walks Lucius through the process of at-home bathing. Lucius walks away convinced this old man could easily trump most of Rome by virtue of how decadent his lifestyle is.

To be fair, that's about everyone's experience when they try a Japanese toilet for the first time. We also get to see Lucius experience ramen for the first time, which is also a treat because hey, good ramen will reduce anyone to tears.

Part of why Emperor Hadrian's requests of Lucius work so well at pacifying the populace is because... yeah, people do need these simple pleasures, and sometimes just feeling clean and warm is enough to improve your outlook. It's easy to take them for granted but they are nevertheless important and they can change your entire day.

It's a bit of a shame that Thermae Romae Novae only skims the surface of the manga because the story does go into interesting territory, but for what it does cover it is still nevertheless a surprisingly engaging series. The wit is sharp and charming, the set-up is wildly creative, and the series has a deep respect of everyone and the very idea of cultural exchange. This is the kind of thing that only could have come from a manga because I can't think of any other medium where this kind of concept would have been able to flourish.

Anime is a medium, not a genre or a fad. It's been here longer than a lot of us, and it'll be here when many of the out-of-touch execs are gone. Just like the ancient ruins of the Romans! As the ancient scribe once said, "People called Romanes, they go the houses!"