Who Is The Odawara Innkeeper?
The inn owner who makes them pay for the broken bath
The Innkeeper of Odawara
The Odawara Innkeeper is the owner of the inn in Odawara where Yaji and Kita stay in Shank's Mare. He is never named, but he is the pair's opposite in the goemon bath fiasco, the first big failure of their trip.
The two do not know how to use the bath and get into the hot water wearing wooden clogs. When Kita finally stamps through the bottom of the cauldron, the inn is thrown into an uproar. The innkeeper scolds them over the broken cauldron and makes them pay for the repair. In this scene, the price of pretending to know it all comes back to them in cash.
A goemon bath is a tub made from an iron cauldron heated by fire from below. To keep your feet off the hot bottom, you step on a floating board and sink it as you get in. The name is said to come from the story of the bandit Ishikawa Goemon, who was boiled in a cauldron.
