Who checks this, and how
Onsen Quest is one person’s project. I travel Japan for its hot springs, and this is the reference I wanted to exist when friends from abroad asked me whether they could get in.
Koki Fukaya — I live in Japan and I go to onsen constantly. 8of the baths on this site I have been to myself and scored in person; the rest I have researched from Japanese sources. I read Japanese, which is the whole reason this site can exist: almost everything that decides whether you can bathe is published only in Japanese, and usually only on the facility’s own website.
How a tattoo policy gets onto this site
The answer people need is not “tattoo friendly” or not. It is more specific than that, and getting it wrong means being turned away at the door.
- Read the Japanese source. The facility’s own site first. If it has not published a policy, the city tourism office or the onsen association — in that order. Blogs and aggregator sites are not sources.
- Record the quote and the date. Every fact stored here carries the URL it came from, the sentence it came from, and the day it was checked. 385 of 385 entries have that trail.
- Separate “banned from the building” from “banned from the shared baths”. These read almost the same in Japanese and mean completely different things. If the ban is on entry, a private bath does not rescue you. If it is only on the shared baths, a private bath usually does. Getting this backwards is the single easiest way to send someone on a wasted trip, so it is stored as its own field and checked by a machine rule.
- Answer day visits and overnight stays separately. Plenty of ryokan refuse tattooed day visitors and accept tattooed overnight guests, or the other way round.
- Say “not published” when it is not published. 222 entries currently say the facility has never stated a policy. That is a real answer and more useful than a guess. 180 entries have a policy confirmed in writing.
The scores are mine, and they are opinions
Facts and opinions are kept apart on purpose.
The tattoo policies, prices and opening hours are facts with sources attached. The five-point scores — the view from the water, the water itself, how comfortable it is, how far it sits from a town, how easy it is to reach — are my judgement. Where a bath is marked as visited, I have been in it. Where it is not, the score is a first pass from the same evidence you can see on the page, and I replace it when I go. The editor’s ten is the list of ones I rate most highly, and two of its slots are deliberately empty.
How this is paid for
Some links on this site are affiliate links: if you book through one, the site earns a commission at no extra cost to you. That is the only revenue here. Nobody pays to be listed, nobody pays to be scored higher, and no facility has ever been given a look at a page before it went up. The affiliate links sit at the bottom of a page, after the answer you came for, and every one of them is labelled where it appears.
Where a bath is a public bathhouse that cannot be booked anywhere, there is no link, because there is nothing honest to link to.
Coverage, and what is missing
385 baths across 34 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, growing daily. The gaps are listed openly on each page under “what we have not confirmed” rather than quietly filled in. The largest known gap: around 190 facilities have never published a tattoo policy anywhere, and settling those needs a phone call rather than a search.
Policies, prices and hours change without notice. Everything here carries the date it was checked — look at it, and call ahead before you build a day around a bath.