Um... Well...

After the relaxing onsen stay, Tetsu and I spent the next couple of days visiting with old friends. 

These two 20 year old young men turned into...

...these two 60 year old "mature" men.

Tetsu's friend, N-san brought along old pictures from their college years and I took photos of their pictures.

Um... Is this proper blogging material?

This picture was taken when Tetsu's college judo group did some intensive training not far from Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. The guys are wearing fundoshi, a traditional type of men's undergarment.  As Tetsu explains it, the week long January training camp ended with a ceremony involving the fundoshi.  On the last day, the young men were given their hand made fundoshi, and they would run to the Meiji Shrine about 6 miles away.   At the shrine the athletes would then shed their sportswear (yes, they did wear their sportswear while running) and wearing just the fundoshi, douse themselves in the shine's ice cold purifying water.  People going to the shrine to pray for New Year's blessings would stare and take pictures and the girls in their beautiful kimonos would titter and giggle at the near naked young men.  I doubt very much that this college custom is allowed any more, at least not at Meiji Shrine...

Though fundoshi used to be traditional underclothing, it is rarely seen nowadays except at festivals.  It is really just a long piece of fabric that is twisted into a cord around the waist and then brought up from the back, opened in the front and tucked into the part encircling the waist.  The back is sort of a thong like arrangement which leaves the buttocks showing.

As an aside.  Though most young men didn't wear these normally, Tetsu, the manic athlete that he was, wore fundoshi under his clothing until I met him...  His mother suggested that if he was planning to marry this foreigner, I might be not like being confronted with fundoshi.  Tetsu retired his fundoshi before I married him, for which I'll forever be grateful to his mother...