Onsen Etiquette, from a Local Who Isn't Really an Onsen Person

First, an admission

I should say this at the start, because it changes how you read everything below.

Honestly, I'm not really an onsen person. I'm the type who gets in and gets straight back out again, so I always feel like I'm wasting it. My husband is the one who likes it.

— Akiko, around forty years in Matsumoto

She still goes about once a month through the winter. That is roughly how it works here. Going to an onsen in Matsumoto is not a special occasion or a spiritual experience. It is closer to what you might call running an errand — something you do because the water is good, it is five minutes away, and it costs less than a coffee and a sandwich.

What does it actually cost?

This is usually the first thing that surprises visitors, so let's get it out of the way.

The ¥2,000 places include massage chairs, restaurants, somewhere to spend the whole day. The cheap ones include hot water. That is the entire offer, and it is the one locals choose.

Prices vary by facility and are usually different for children — check before you go.

Akiko and her husband usually go to one of the baths in Asama Onsen, on the northeast edge of the city. What she looks for there is not what you might expect:

A wide outdoor bath. If it's narrow you can't relax — you're aware of the other person, it's awkward. The quality of the water matters, but honestly what I want is space — in the outdoor bath and in the bathing room itself.

And then whether the changing room has decent skincare, and a hairdryer with real power. Some of them look impressive and produce nothing.

— Akiko

Asama Onsen water is mostly undiluted from the source, so it doesn't have the chlorine smell you sometimes get elsewhere. Two things make that possible here: there is simply a lot of water coming out of the ground, and it emerges at what Akiko describes as a miraculously convenient temperature — hot enough to use, not so hot that it has to be cooled down first.

And there is a lot of it about: Nagano Prefecture has 706 public bathhouses fed by hot spring water — more than any other prefecture in Japan (Ministry of the Environment, FY2023).

That number is the explanation for everything else in this article. These baths date from a time when houses here didn't have their own bathrooms, and they were run and shared by the neighbourhood. The buildings survived, and so did the habits that go with them.

Which is why an onsen in Nagano feels less like a spa and more like going to use your own bathroom — one that happens to be enormous, and a short way down the road from your house.

What a local actually does, in order

Written guides tend to give you the official version. This is Akiko's own sequence, start to finish, exactly as she described it:

1. Undress completely. Everything goes in the basket or locker — no swimwear, no exceptions.
2. If there is a kakeyu station (a place to pour water over yourself), use it briefly.
3. But she skips straight past that and washes properly at a washing station instead — sitting down, taking off her makeup, washing her hair and her whole body.
4. Into the indoor bath first. Briefly. "Honestly, quite briefly."
5. Out to the open-air bath. Half-submerged, leaning back at an angle. This is where she stays longest — though "longest" only means longer than the indoor bath.
6. Back to the washing area. Attend to the dry skin on her heels; if there's time, a proper body scrub.
7. Wash again.
8. One more quick dip in the indoor bath, then out.

Two things worth noticing. First, she washes before getting in and again in the middle — the bath is not where you get clean, it's where you get in once you already are. Second, nobody stays in for very long. If you have imagined yourself soaking peacefully for forty minutes, that is not what the people around you will be doing.

How thorough is the rinse before you get in?

Two or three scoops. Just sloshing it over yourself.

— Akiko

And the towel on the head, the image everyone has seen? She doesn't bother. "You don't have to."

The rules nobody writes down

Here is the part that no official guide will tell you, and the part that actually causes friction. Some bathhouses have their own local customs, enforced entirely by the regulars — and those rules are not posted anywhere at all.

Which means, as Akiko puts it, that Japanese people frequently fail to follow them too. There is no way to learn them in advance. You look at what the people around you are doing, and you copy it. And if someone does tell you off:

Just say sorry, smile, and let it go.

— Akiko

That is the entire coping strategy, and it is the same one the locals use.

If there are too many regulars, even I don't love it. There'll be some rule that only exists in that one place.

"You can't use that tap — that lady is using it." Or, "Look, there's a mark right there." And you're thinking, how would I possibly know that.

Or the stool has to be set down at an angle on top. Not straight. At an angle.

— Akiko

This is worth internalising, because it reframes the whole anxiety. You are not failing to learn a national rulebook that everyone else has memorised. Some of these customs are local to one building, and a Japanese person walking in from the next town would get them wrong too. The only real shortcut is to go with someone who already knows that particular building — which is, more or less, why our walks exist.

The small things visitors actually get wrong

Ask most people what foreigners do wrong in an onsen and you'll hear "they put their towel in the water." In practice, visitors already know that one. The things that trip people up are much smaller:

• Not putting the stool and basin back. When you finish at a washing station, return the stool and the basin to where you found them. Rinse them first.
• Where the towel goes. There is usually a specific rail or hook. Not on the floor.
• Rinsing your suds toward the drain. After you wash, push the foam away from the neighbouring stations rather than leaving it to spread.
• Brushing your teeth. Some people mind this a great deal. Do it in your room or at home, not at the washing stations.
• Walking around uncovered. You're naked, and that's completely normal — but people here hold a small towel in front of themselves when moving between the bath and the changing room. Visitors often don't, simply because it doesn't occur to them.

None of these are really rule-breaking. It's more that everyone quietly does it that way.

— Akiko

One that catches people out: the older places

In some of the older bathhouses there is no shower at the washing station. You scoop water out of the bath itself with a basin. If that's what you find, don't panic — the principle is the same:

As long as you understand that you rinse the dirt off first, it doesn't really matter whether it's a basin or a shower.

— Akiko

Can I go in with a tattoo?

Here we have to be honest with you, because a lot of websites are not.

It varies by facility, and we can't tell you in advance what any given bathhouse will do. Akiko doesn't know either — it isn't something that comes up in her own life, and she hasn't seen it tested. Policies in smaller regional bathhouses tend to be stricter than in cities, but there is no reliable general rule.

If you have a tattoo, check with the specific facility before you go. A private family bath (kashikiri-buro) is the reliable alternative — Matsumoto has them, they cost more than a standard entry, and nobody else is in the room.

If you'd rather not make that call yourself, this is exactly the sort of thing walking with a local guide is for.

Long hair, phones, and photographs

• Long hair: tie it up so it doesn't touch the water. A towel wrapped around it, a bun, an elastic — any of it is fine. The point is only that it stays out of the bath. Akiko notes, drily, that the older women simply wear a plastic cap.
• Photographs: no. Not in the bath, and not in the changing room either.
• Your phone: also no — don't even look at it in the changing area. There have been enough problems with covert filming that people are genuinely uneasy about it, and you will be misread.

What happens afterwards?

We asked whether there was a ritual — the bottle of milk in the lobby, that sort of thing. There isn't:

Nothing in particular. You don't do anything. It's just ordinary life, so you go home.

— Akiko

If you go between three and five in the afternoon you'll find the local men there. They bathe, go home, eat dinner with a drink, and go to bed when it gets dark. That's the whole rhythm — and if you want to see it rather than read about it, that window is when we take people.

And if you're wondering what everyone is talking about in there — it is not the beauty of the seasons. It's gossip. Who built a new house. Whose son did what.

The one thing she'd tell you

At the end of a long conversation about water quality and unwritten rules, we asked what the single most useful thing would be for a visitor to know. The answer was immediate:

You need coins. Bring about ten ¥100 coins — then a family can share them.

And the ¥100 that comes back out of the locker, that's what you buy the coffee milk with.

— Akiko

Both the lockers and the shoe lockers usually want a ¥100 coin, and not all of them give it back. Forgotten your towel? Most places sell one on the spot for around ¥200 — but you will need the change for that too.

¥100 coins are a genuine must-have item for a Japanese onsen. Turning up with nothing but a ¥10,000 note, or nothing but cards, is the most reliable way to have a bad time.