Sauna Mother arrives in Tokyo, a two-hour immersive experience that promises a second birth between heartbeats, baths and mechanized cuddles. Because now you can even buy the pleasure of being a newborn again
Mum is always mum, it is one of the most famous sayings that unites generations of children all over the world. But it is in Japan, where technology has already learned to take care of a good part of our daily needs, that it was decided to monetize the last apparent frontier of well-being: giving adults back that condition of absolute maternal dependence from which we spend the rest of our lives trying to emancipate ourselves, only to then discover that being grown up is a considerable effort.
As? Simply taking us back inside the mother’s womb for 120 minutes, amidst heartbeats, muffled sounds and scents that evoke pregnancy, to then accompany us through a second birth and entrust ourselves to the care of an artificial figure that we have chosen from a catalogue. Stuff that Freud would have put his hands in his hair. What seems more like a modern madness than a revolutionary beauty treatment is called “Sauna Mother”, is arriving at the end of October in Roppongi, in the heart of Tokyo, and obviously has a cost: 47 euros per person. But the artificial womb can accommodate up to four at the same time.
Symbolically becoming newborns again is simple. It begins in an 85 degree sauna, between red lights and a bench on which to curl up in a fetal position, before facing a second birth through a tub of cold water, where a gigantic hand provides the first bath.
This is followed by a shower during which you rest your head on the lap of an operator to be washed (because evidently being reborn is not enough, you also need to be looked after). The true masterpiece arrives with the Mother Sofa, an enormous mechanized sofa that envelops, cradles and caresses the body while the maternal face appears through a projection. There are four models available, from the Japanese goddess Izanami to an anime mother, through world art and mythology, while the movement of the sofa can be adjusted to three speeds, including the “hasty” one.
A tailor-made maternity, in short, where even cuddles can be chosen, adjusted and purchased, because if there is one thing that the Japanese understood before anyone else, it is that any human need, even the most intimate and apparently impossible to market, can become an immersive, technological and strictly reservation-based experience. And that even a mother’s love, when it becomes a service, has a price list and an expiration time. The difference is that this time, when the voice tells you that you’ve grown up and have to go, you can always book another session.
