Areas

Tokyo is not a hot-spring town: most of what is sold as onsen here is a business hotel's large bath, water trucked in from Hakone or Yugawara, or a well drilled under an office block. The written answers split by owner, not by district — Mitsui Garden Hotels state they have dropped the restriction outright, Dormy Inn and APA hand out cover stickers at the front desk, and the independent hot-spring inns in Hinohara and Kamata say nothing at all.

Real hot spring inside Kyoto city is rare; the onsen are out at Arashiyama and at Yunohana in Kameoka, while the centre is business-hotel large baths. The chain hotels are the ones that answer in writing — one states its restriction has been abolished, another refuses the main bath and sends you to its five free private baths — and every Arashiyama and Yunohana ryokan we checked publishes nothing either way.

Osaka's bathing is city hotels plus large day-spa complexes, a few of which also rent rooms; the genuine hot springs sit at the edge of the prefecture, at Minoh and Inunakiyama. Refusals here are phrased bluntly and often cover entry to the whole building rather than the bath alone, and the one unconditional yes we found is a chain business hotel whose bath is artificial carbonated water, not a hot spring.

Two hours from Tokyo. The big resort hotels mostly say no in writing; the day-use baths and smaller inns are where the yes-answers are. If a place is "private bath only", reserve the rental bath when you book the room, not on arrival.

Forty minutes from Tokyo by shinkansen, and the area where refusals are stated most bluntly. The yes-answers here almost always come with a cover sticker or a private bath attached.

Japan's most famous hot-spring town by volume of water. Several inns say yes to small tattoos with a cover sticker, and paid private baths are common.

A long coastline of resort hotels and small inns. Chain-operated hotels here publish one group-wide rule, so a single answer often covers several properties.

Hundreds of baths, a city tourism office that publishes its own tattoo-OK list, and the highest share of yes-answers we have seen. Big hotels are still the exception.

Large riverside hotels two hours north of Tokyo. Several state a main-bath refusal and then point you at a private bath in the same sentence.

Boutique inns with in-room baths; many simply never state a policy. Ask before you book, or let us.

A small mountain town of open-air baths you tour with a wooden pass. Most inns say nothing about tattoos on their sites, so this is an area where asking pays off.

Seven public bathhouses you visit in yukata, and inns that answer the tattoo question in writing more often than anywhere else we checked.

Japan's oldest hot-spring town, thirty minutes from Kobe. Old, formal inns; policies are usually behind a chatbot rather than on the page.

Hokkaido's big-bath town. The large hotels here mostly leave the question unanswered on their sites; we are asking them one by one.

Shikoku's oldest bathhouse town. A small area where both clear yes-answers and written refusals exist side by side.

An hour from Sapporo. One hotel accepts fully covered tattoos; the largest says no even to stickers.

Two different towns share one name: the Japanese-run onsen hotels out at Konbu and Annupuri do publish a policy, and their answers range from an explicit welcome to a flat refusal in the same few kilometres. The Western-facing ski hotels in Hirafu have detailed English onsen pages that never mention tattoos at all, so there you have to email.

Few inns here write anything down, but the ones that do are unusually precise — one hotel names the exact cover-sticker size it will accept, another says yes with no conditions at all. Several of the small ryokan sites still fail on https or are Shift-JIS only, so their policy pages are hard to reach even when they exist.

A village of thirteen free public bathhouses run by the neighbourhoods, with the inns arranged around them; most inns send you out to the soto-yu rather than dwelling on their own baths. Not one of the inns we checked states a tattoo policy anywhere on its own site, including the ones with full English pages, so the question has to be asked before booking.

A dozen wooden inns along one short river street, several small enough that every bath is a lockable single-party bath rather than a shared one. None of them publish a tattoo policy, so here the practical question is usually whether a private bath is free at the hour you want, not whether you are allowed in.

Yunokawa is a seventeen-inn hot-spring quarter five minutes from Hakodate airport, with a second cluster of spring-fed hotels down on the bay. Three of the larger houses refuse in writing and one points tattooed guests at its rooftop rental open-air bath; the rest, including the most expensive inns in the quarter, publish nothing, so this is an area where asking ahead pays off.