Higashikata, in the hills twenty minutes on foot above Nigatsuden Station Day-use private bath houses

Nonoka Family Onsen

家族温泉野の香

Does Nonoka Family Onsen allow tattoos? In a private bath

Private bath only

Eight bathing rooms up in the hills behind Ibusuki, each with a different open-air tub, one of them hewn from Aso lava so full of gas bubbles that a single person can carry the stone.

No tattoo rule is published, and with eight bath rooms hired one party at a time, none governs your bath. Each room holds an indoor bath, an open-air bath and a three-mat tatami room, and the eight open-air baths are all built differently, one of them cut from Aso lava rock. Nobody else is in the water with you.

Where it is

Hakata to Ibusuki is about 3 h 25: the Kyushu Shinkansen to Kagoshima-Chuo, then the Ibusuki Makurazaki line down the coast, which the sightseeing train Ibusuki no Tamatebako also runs. Ureshino is about 1 h 20, a limited express to Takeo-Onsen and the Nishi-Kyushu Shinkansen one stop further. Kurokawa has no railway at all: the coach from Hakata takes about 2 h 40 by way of Hita and Tsuetate. Nonoka Family Onsen · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · open in Google Maps

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 operator’s own pages on the eight bath rooms and the rates)

Read on: nonoka-onsen.com/lessons.html

Best for: An hour of hill hot spring on a weekday, for two thousand yen a room

Opened in October 2004. Weekdays cost 2,000 yen an hour for one room holding up to four adults, with 1,000 yen for each further half hour and 550 yen for each extra person; weekends are dearer. Open 10:00 to 23:00, reservations from 09:00 on the day, last reception 22:00. Closed the first, third and fifth Tuesday of the month, plus the Wednesday after the third Tuesday in May for the annual inspection. The operator calls its water an isotonic spring, close in osmotic pressure to body fluid, which it says is rare in Japan.

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Others in the same group

More places in the Ibusuki Onsen with private bath only

HananoyuKoyama in Higashikata, up a cedar valley behind the town → YurianJunicho, in the hills above the town → Bettei Amafuru OkaHigashikata, on the Medipolis hill west of the town → Koran no Yu KinkouroNishikata, on the coast road four kilometers north of the town → Ryokan KawakyuOmure, by the river a few streets back from the seafront → Ibusuki Seaside HotelJucho, at the northern end of the seafront →

All Ibusuki Onsen listings →