Bessho Onsen, five minutes on foot from the station Ryokan ★★★★☆

Ryokan Hanaya

旅館 花屋

Does Ryokan Hanaya allow tattoos? In a private bath

Private bath only

Founded in 1917 by villagers who pooled their money to build an inn, Hanaya is a sprawl of wooden wings joined by covered corridors, and nine of its rooms come with a bath of their own fed straight from the spring.

Hanaya publishes no tattoo rule, so the answer is the room. Nine rooms in the detached wings have their own indoor bath on free-flowing spring water, and four special rooms have a private open-air bath. The inn says outright it has no reservable private bath, and its three shared baths carry no stated rule, so book one of those thirteen rooms rather than a main-building room without a bath.

Where it is

Tokyo STN Ueda STN change to Ueda Electric Railway · 27 min Hokuriku Shinkansen 85 min Hotel location
Bessho-Onsen STN
Everything here is reached from Tokyo. Karuizawa is an hour on the Hokuriku Shinkansen and Echigo-Yuzawa 79 minutes on the Joetsu Shinkansen, both with no change. Kawaguchiko is the Fuji Excursion from Shinjuku, about two hours, and Isawa the Kaiji, an hour and forty. The Nagano towns change once: Bessho at Ueda, Nozawa at Iiyama, and Yudanaka, Hakuba and Myoko at Nagano.. Ryokan Hanaya · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · open in Google Maps

JR East Pass Covers the Hokuriku Shinkansen from Tokyo to Ueda. The Ueda Electric Railway on to Bessho is a private line and is paid separately; the JR Tokyo Wide Pass stops short of Ueda. Sold on Klook.

What happens when you arrive

Skip the shared baths and reserve the private one the way this page describes. Once the door is closed, the bath is yours.

How we know

Confirmed from official site, bath structure rather than a tattoo policy (the inn’s FAQ lists the room types, and each room page describes its bath)

Read on: hanaya.ne.jp/faq.htm

Best for: Bathing in your own room inside a building the national government registers as a cultural property

Thirty-two rooms: 16 in the main building with toilet but no bath; 9 in the hanare wings with a free-flowing indoor spring bath (the inn notes they are not separate houses); 3 Japanese rooms with an open-air bath (72, 73 and the Sakura Goten samurai-house suite); room 23, a Japanese-Western room with twin beds and an open-air bath; and 3 Western suites in THE MAIN. Only numbered rooms shown on the site can be chosen; the 8-mat hanare plan is assigned by the inn. All stays include dinner and breakfast. Room 72 has stairs in the corridor. The shared marble and Wakakusa baths swap between men and women at 22:00; the open-air bath runs 15:00–22:00 and 6:00–10:30. The inn opened in 1917 and was registered as a tangible cultural property in 2006.

Check availability

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