Kanaya Ryokan
金谷旅館
Does Kanaya Ryokan allow tattoos? In a private bath
Kanaya’s Issen-yu, the oldest bath on the property, is the one you can reserve for yourselves; the famous Sennin-buro beside it is a 20-meter cypress hall with no rule on tattoos either way.
The inn publishes a reservable bath, Issen-yu, which would answer the question on structure alone, and it says nothing about tattoos anywhere on its site. The reason it is not a listing is money, not policy: Kanaya sells its rooms through Rakuten, Jalan and Ikyu and appears on neither Booking.com nor Agoda, so there is no link this site can use. Day-use bathing at ¥1,000 is open to anyone who turns up, with the same silence on tattoos.
The bath
The water is Kawachi Onsen, the inn's own source pumped from the foot of Mount Kanaya. The inn says it has flowed into every bath on the property since it opened in 1867. It is free-flowing around the clock: a weakly alkaline simple spring, hypotonic and mild, colorless and clear with a smooth feel, and fit to drink by the inn's account. All the baths run 24 hours for guests.
Sennin-buro, the 'thousand-person bath', was built in 1915: about 20 meters long, 5 meters wide and up to a meter deep. Walls and ceiling as well as the tub are hinoki cypress, and the inn calls it the biggest all-cypress bath in Japan. It is mostly used by men now, but it is a mixed bath: women enter from their own changing room, taking the key that hangs there, and may wear a bath towel. Manyo-no-yu is the women's bath, the largest wooden one in the country by the inn's account, with one end built on a semicircle. The open-air baths are separate for men and women, each with an utase-yu pounding spout.
Issen-yu is the private bath, down a flagstone path. It is named for the one-sen coin box bathers once paid into, built at the end of the Meiji period and the oldest bath here. It is reservable; the site gives no price or slot length, so ask at the desk. Day visitors pay ¥1,000, ¥500 for elementary-school children and ¥300 below that, and the price moves with the season.
The hotel
An inn founded in 1867 whose main building, in the sukiya style, went up in 1929. Its ceiling is Akita jindai cedar, its round beam eleven ken long, its pillars cut from giant Amagi cedars. There are 15 rooms between the main building and a Western annex with hot-spring showers. They range from 6 to 14 mats of tatami mats, from the view room Tachibana (10 and 6 mats) to two-room suites, plus a 25 m² Western room with its own bath and toilet. Dinner is kaiseki (a multi-course Japanese meal) of Izu's mountains and sea, bought at the Ito and Shimoda markets and served in the room. Check-in 3 p.m., checkout 10 a.m.
Good to know
- Every bath runs 24 hours for guests, so the giant cypress bath can be had alone in the small hours.
- A bath towel may be worn in Sennin-buro, which is mixed; women enter with the key from their own changing room.
- Four minutes on foot from Rendaiji Station, one stop short of the end of the Izukyu line.
- Day-use bathing for ¥1,000, with the inn warning that the price changes by season.
Getting there
The Odoriko limited express runs from Tokyo to Izukyu-Shimoda with no change, about 2 hours 40 minutes. The inn is closer to Rendaiji, the stop before Izukyu-Shimoda on the Izukyu line: 4 minutes on foot from there. From Izukyu-Shimoda Station the bus takes 8 minutes to the Kawachi Onsen stop. The inn's access page lists no pickup, taxi time or parking.
Rendaiji STN · Izukyu line
4 minutes on foot.
The Odoriko limited express runs from Tokyo to Izukyu-Shimoda with no change, about 2 hours 40 minutes; from there a bus takes 8 minutes to the Kawachi Onsen stop.
Where it is
- Shinkansen tickets Seats between any two stations, booked by date.
- JR Tokyo Wide Pass ¥16,000 · 3 days Three days of JR East trains from Tokyo, and the Izukyu line from Ito on to Shimoda.
- Izukyu Discovery Pass Worth it if your stay also stops at Ito or Izu-Kogen. It covers two or three days in a row on the Izukyu line between Ito and Izukyu-Shimoda, and a vacant ordinary seat on the Odoriko. It doesn’t cover the JR part of the ride from Tokyo.
- Japan Rail Pass from ¥53,000 · 7, 14 or 21 days For a trip that takes in several regions by Shinkansen and JR lines.
What happens when you arrive
Skip the shared baths and reserve a private bath.
How we know
Confirmed from official site (the Sennin-buro, the thousand-person bath page, which names Issen-yu as the reservable bath); no tattoo rule on kanayaryokan.com, and no listing on either affiliate platform
Best for: reserving Issen-yu for yourselves in a Meiji-era inn with the longest cypress bath in Japan next door
Sennin-buro, built 1915, is about 20 meters long, 5 meters wide and up to a meter deep, all cypress, mixed bathing, and the operator says a bath towel may be worn. Manyo-no-yu is the women’s bath, described as the largest wooden women’s bath in Japan, part of it built on a semicircular plan. Issen-yu, the reservable bath, is the oldest on the property, built at the end of the Meiji period and named for the one-sen box people used to pay into. There are separate open-air baths for men and women with a pounding spout. All baths run 24 hours for guests on the inn’s own Kawachi source, free-flowing, weakly alkaline. Day use is ¥1,000 for adults, 500 for primary-school children and 300 below that, and the price moves with the season. The site answers on kanayaryokan.com; the old kanayaryokan.secret.jp host still resolves and serves the same plain HTML.
Check availabilityBooking through this link costs you nothing extra and earns us a small commission, which keeps this guide free and up to date for our tattoo community. Thanks for your support.