"Sento" in Tokyo that try to stand out are drawing new customers even as the popularity of communal bathhouses continues to decline from the days when most Japanese homes lacked baths.

Shimizu-Yu in Minami-Aoyama, a fashionable part of Minato Ward, now looks like a cafe or beauty parlor after the 100-year-old bathhouse underwent a drastic makeover in 2009 by owner Masahiro Okura, 52.

To lure young people, Okura made "fashionability, quality and cleanness" his priorities in rebuilding the sento. For example, he installed a special machine to boil water believed to be good for beauty and installed the kinds of baths usually found in resorts, such as a highly concentrated carbonated spring bath and a "silk bath" of fine bubbles.