I have never felt comfortable in them. They were usually way too hot for me, and the whole getting naked in front of strangers thing...I was never able to relax.
Part of that was a teacher at a school I worked at always tried to convince me to use the local public bath. "It's so great, and no one looks at each other or cares what you look like naked." Which is probably true for Japanese. She kept telling me how "nobody looks, don't worry" and then went on to tell me a foreign woman was a regular patron at the bathhouse she went to, and oh, what a beautiful body she had. It really was stunning, she said....
