Onsen

A bath costs less than almost anything else you will do on a trip to Japan. Day-use entry at a municipal or ryokan bathhouse generally runs from a couple of hundred yen at the cheapest town baths to around a thousand at somewhere with a view and a decent changing room; the outliers upward are resort spas selling the building rather than the water. Budget an hour and a half for a proper visit — twenty minutes of that is undressing, washing and dressing again, and the bath itself is not something to hurry.

The sequence is fixed and it is the one thing worth learning in advance. Shoes off at the entrance, clothes off completely in the changing room, everything into a basket or locker, and you walk into the bathing hall carrying only the small towel. You sit at a shower station and wash — properly, with soap, rinsing all of it off — before any part of you goes into the water. The bath is for soaking in, not for cleaning in, and the water is shared. Long hair goes up. The small towel stays out of the water; most people fold it on their head or rest it on the rim.

Two things regularly surprise first-timers. Bathing is nude and separated by gender, so swimwear is not an option at a traditional facility. And a visible tattoo can still get you turned away, most reliably at older municipal baths — the practice is loosening but it has not gone, and the workaround is a private bath, which many inns rent by the hour under the name kashikiri-buro.

The instinct is to pick the most famous name and the most photogenic outdoor bath. That is the wrong first criterion, because the two hardest parts of a first onsen are the undressing and the not knowing what to do next, and neither is easier at a place with a queue.

Pick on three things instead. First, a facility that takes day visitors, so you are not committing to a night and a kaiseki dinner before you know whether you enjoy this. Second, somewhere you can reach and leave on public transport without a timetable hanging over you, because watching the clock in a hot bath ruins the only thing a bath is for. Third — and this is the one people skip — check whether it has an indoor bath as well as an open-air one. An outdoor bath in a mountain gorge is the photograph, but the indoor hall is where the changing room, the shower stations and the other bathers demonstrating the sequence are, and following someone else through it once removes most of the anxiety.

Two secondary points once you have those. Smaller and older is usually more interesting water and a more forgiving crowd than a large resort spa. And if you have a tattoo, sort that out before you travel rather than at the entrance, either by choosing a facility that says plainly it admits tattooed bathers or by booking a private bath; being refused at the door is a bad first experience of something that should not be stressful.

Washing in the bath. The single error that actually offends. The soap, the scrubbing and the rinsing all happen sitting down at the shower station, and you enter the water already clean. If you are not sure you have rinsed enough, you have not.

Bringing the big towel in. The large towel stays in the changing room with your clothes. Only the small one comes through, and it does not go in the water.

Treating it as a swim. People used to a spa pool get in, get bored and get out in five minutes. The water in a good onsen is hot enough that fifteen minutes is a long soak; the rhythm is in and out, cooling off between rounds, over an hour or so. Rushing it is why some visitors conclude they do not like onsen.

Arriving straight after a heavy meal or a drink. Very hot water plus alcohol is genuinely dangerous, not merely discouraged, and most facilities say so at the door. Hydrate before and after.

Assuming day-use hours match the building's hours. Inns that open their baths to non-residents usually do so only in a window in the middle of the day, because the evening belongs to guests. Turning up at six in the evening at a ryokan bath is the most common wasted journey in this category.

Planning it as a stop between two other things. An onsen is not a photo you take and move on from. Anything that has you back on a train within the hour is better spent elsewhere.