Wednesday, February 21, 2018

words - Is タオル used for the towels used at onsen?


onsenjapan.net claims that タオル is used for "towel", presumably the large one. When I asked a staff member at Odeo onsen "これ は 何 ですか?" while indicating the large towel I was holding, the staff member said "タオル".


I'm not 100% convinced, though. I half suspect that the glossary (and the staff member) may have chosen a gairaigo term over more traditional terms since it'd be easier for foreigners to remember. Also, in English the terms "large towel" and "small towel" feel very clumsy to me, so I would have thought that Japanese would have kept its existing words for the large towel and small towel.


I tried seeing if towel was mentioned in http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/温泉 , but unlike the English-language version it didn't (obviously only foreigners need to google how to use an onsen!). Other pages I tried looking at were this, this, this, and this - the fact that towels don't appear in those glossaries would be consistent with it being plain old boring gairaigo, and that Japanese doesn't have special onsen-related terminology for towels.


Is タオル used for the towels used at onsen, both the large towel and the small one, or are other words used as well?



Answer



Towels were introduced in the Meiji era and were almost exclusively imported from England. That's why the word タオル came from English, and there is no other word for them (although Japan of course had their own fabrics before that (I'm specifically talking about terrycloth)).


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