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The story
On the 23rd, Ken Maeda of the comedy duo Slim Club posted on X about an experience at a sauna where a female staff member in her 30s came in to swap out the equipment, sarcastically remarking, “Because this world just loves gender equality.” The following day, the 24th, he doubled down with more sarcasm aimed at “people who can’t understand the intent behind my words,” writing that he was “worried about Japan.”
On 5ch, reactions were split over how to read the true intent of the post, and the discussion also grew into a debate over how staff should be assigned by gender for cleaning and attendant duties at saunas and bathhouses, if gender equality is the standard being invoked.
Slim Club’s Maeda fires scathing sarcasm at “people who can’t grasp the true meaning behind my X post” — “I’m worried about Japan”
Ken Maeda (50) of the comedy duo Slim Club updated his X account on the night of the 24th. Regarding his recent post, he wrote that he was “worried about Japan” when it came to “people who can’t understand the meaning behind my words.”
In his post on the 23rd, Maeda wrote: “So I’m in the sauna — totally naked, of course — and a female staff member in her 30s comes in to swap out the towels laid on the sauna seats. If there’s a job doing the reverse, I’d love to apply. Since this world just loves gender equality, that means it’s fine for a man to go into the women’s sauna too, right? So exciting.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Oh dear, that sounds rough.
Right? People just want to twist things any way they like so they've got an excuse to bash him.
He's just farming X "impressions" (view-based ad payouts) off the outrage.
Spirited and splendid indeed! (keeping the old comedy-routine catchphrase bit going)
gets tangled up with an annoying guy,
fires back with an annoying reply — he's basically the annoying guy himself.
It's like a guy tossing out bait, getting bitten by piranhas, and then screaming "it's just bait!" lol
Makes an annoying post,
gets tangled up with an annoying guy,
fires back with an annoying reply, and becomes the annoying guy himself — all to cash in.
This guy's an "impression-begging" comedian doing it on purpose (farming X engagement payouts), same breed as Onigoe Tomahawk (another controversy-baiting comedy duo).
Maybe factor in this reality first —
> In Japan, over 95% of people arrested for sex crimes (non-consensual intercourse, non-consensual indecent acts, etc.) are male — men overwhelmingly make up the offenders.
Yeah, for a comedian he never actually says anything funny.
Also, nobody gives a charitable read to someone with low likability to begin with.
If it's going to cause misunderstandings, just spell everything out straight.
Honestly, "read the room" or "pick up on it" is a uniquely Japanese, Galápagos-style thing anyway. Are Japanese people supposed to be psychic? If anything, if you don't put it into words, the real meaning never gets across.
Maeda: "I'm gonna be the King of Flame Wars!" (riffing on the famous One Piece line "I'm gonna be King of the Pirates!")
lol
Kinda want to round them all up in one place and let them fight it out. Wonder who'd survive.
Men's rooms should be cleaned by men. That's really all there is to it, no?
Depending on the size of the facility, one cleaner is enough to cover the whole place. In that case, it's simply more practical to have a woman who doesn't draw complaints going in and out of the men's room.
Even so, isn't the point that they should hire one man and one woman? Even guys find a situation like this uncomfortable.
At the local spa I used to go to, a woman — not exactly young either — used to come in to check the bath water temperature.
He's saying he's "worried about Japan" precisely because more people seem to feel it "can be read either way." I personally didn't think it could be read two ways at all.
Yeah, this thread-starter shows up a lot (a regular known for spamming threads on certain topics).
Background and Key Points
For readers outside Japan, a few pieces of context matter here. Sento (public bathhouses) and many sauna facilities routinely send staff of either sex into single-sex bathing areas to clean, restock, or check water temperature when a facility is short-staffed or only employs one attendant per shift — this is a long-standing, legally unremarkable practice, not a recent policy shift. “Gender equality” (男女平等) is also a live flashpoint in Japanese public discourse, often invoked sarcastically in online arguments about differential treatment of men and women in everyday spaces, which is the register Maeda was working in. Separately, X’s ad-revenue-sharing “impression” (view count monetization) program is well known on 5ch as an incentive for public figures to post inflammatory content deliberately, which colors how skeptically posters read celebrities’ controversial tweets.
The thread’s real fault line isn’t whether Maeda’s original joke was in poor taste — most posters seem to concede it reads as needlessly provocative — but whether his framing was genuine social commentary, deliberate engagement bait for ad revenue, or, per the majority mocking tone, both at once, making his “you didn’t get my true meaning” follow-up look hypocritical rather than clarifying.
What outside readers may miss is that no one in the thread offers hard data on how common opposite-sex staff entry actually is at saunas versus bathhouses — only anecdotes — despite one post citing Japan’s official sex-crime arrest statistics (over 95% male offenders) as if that alone settles a staffing-policy question it doesn’t actually address.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Entertainment] Slim Club’s Maeda fires scathing sarcasm at “people who can’t grasp the true meaning behind my X post” — “I’m worried about Japan”.”
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