Hi everyone!
We are a 10 people group from Spain who will visit Kyoto for the first week of November.
We want to experience the relaxing culture of sentos / onsen, and we are looking a place for enjoying it.
We have asked a few places via mail and most of them don’t asure us the entrance because we are a large group and/or 2 people have some tattoos.
We completely understand and respect the culture around the public bath houses but we hope that there will be some places that we could go who are tattoo friendly and can handle our group ( 3 women and 7 men)
Any recommendations??
Thanks to all!
by Ejecutador97
4 comments
Kyoto isn’t much of an onsen area, so there aren’t a lot of options to begin with, and tattoos rule out most of them. I’ve heard the recently-reopened Kurama onsen is tattoo friendly but my tattoo is intentionally inconspicuous enough that it wasn’t noticed the few times I went so I couldn’t tell you firsthand. There’s an indoor and an outdoor bath there so even the group of 7 guys should be able to fit more or less comfortably between the two, especially the outdoor bath is pretty spacious (at least, assuming it’s the same size/layout as the women’s side).
I’ve heard of a few other tattoo-friendly places that hopefully other people here will remember the name of, but I think you’re going to have a really hard time in Kyoto. I don’t suppose a day trip to Kinosaki is in the cards? The baths there aren’t that big but there are multiple of them in the same area and at the very least the tattoos won’t be an issue.
Would you be interested in renting out the sento privately for your group? I have a friend whose family owns one and I helped her translate the flyer for the private rental to English. It’s been a while so I’m not sure if they are still doing it but I can ask if you are interested.
It shouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference you are in a group. The men and women will also be going to different baths.
Tattoos on the other hand, that’s a problem, you’d have to go to a specific place that allows them
From what I observed, most of the smaller onsens might be able to accommodate that many people but not necessarily as a group if that makes sense. There are larger public baths by gender, smaller private baths (for two people) and some rare larger coed baths (but you have swimsuits, usually more common in western hotels.) My suggestion would to be to look for Super Sentos, they are larger have multiple public baths and can handle more clients. I believe there are some in Osaka and more in Tokyo. Kyoto has smaller onsens but they are still nice, you can try booking in smaller groups possibly. I’m not sure what your accommodation plans are, but we stayed at two hotels that had lovely onsens. One in Kyoto itself and one in Arashiyama.
Comments are closed.