Being in japan on your period?

Question:

Ok, so I am going to japan for 6 weeks this summer, and will be staying with a host family. (it's like an exchange study abroad program thing.) so I have a problem. The Japanese are vey clean and bathe almost every night. So what do you do when you're on your period? Is it polite to say 'no I'm not going to take a bath?' we might share bath water or something, so I don't exactly know what to do in this situation. or if we visit a bath house. So in short, how do I say that I can't/would prefer to not take a bath?

Answer:

YFU, perhaps? What city are you going to?! I'll be in Kobe! On the JAFS scholarship! If you're part of the YFU group, look us up on facebook if you're not part of that already... we've all been getting together and having a lot of funnnn.

You don't particularly have to SAY you're not taking a bath. It would be okay to if you're the last one to bathe since you're just draining the water afterwards, but if you don't want to take a bath, since everyone's just going to be sharing the same water... you really don't have to say much. You can just go, shower, and get out! Its not impolite to say you'd rather not take a bath, either.

If they offer to take you to a bathhouse during your period... that's really unlucky. I'm sure your host mother will understand if you try to explain your dilemma to her, and if you don't want to, you could always just get around it by politely declining (the Japanese rarely [read: never] say no, so when I say "politely decline" I mean more of the standard Japanese "the bathhouse? today? that's a bit...") and suggesting an alternative ( "how about we go next week?" ).

Every japanese girl has to think about this kind of stuff too, so its no biggy! Especially since tampons are really rare there...
EDIT: you CAN find tampons in Japan, they're not not as common. And since you're worried about this to begin with, the advice to "just wear a tampon" isn't good either, because you probably don't use them. I'm assuming that if you haven't considered it already, its probably already out of the questions. A lot of girls don't want to.

And remember, the bath isn't about getting clean anyway! The bath is for relaxing AFTER you get clean!