Araya Totoan
あらや滔々庵
Does Araya Totoan allow tattoos? In a private bath
The family that kept the key to the lord’s bath for the Daishoji domain still runs this inn on the spring where, the story goes, a crow was found healing its wing. Eleven of its seventeen rooms take that water into a tub of their own.
Eleven of the seventeen rooms have an open-air bath fed from the inn’s own source, and one of those is the booking to make. Araya publishes no tattoo rule for its two large baths or its dark “meditation bath”, so treat those as unknown.
Where it is
Kanazawa STN
Kaga-Onsen STN change to Hokutetsu Kaga bus · 12 min
Hokuriku Shinkansen 18 min
✈Komatsu Airport
Hotel locationYamashiro Onsen STN
JR Hokuriku Area Pass Four days on the Hokuriku Shinkansen between Tsuruga and Kurobe-Unazukionsen, non-reserved, for 7,000 yen. It covers the ride from Kanazawa to Kaga-Onsen; the Hokutetsu Kaga bus from the station is paid separately. Worth it if Awara, Unazuki or a second Kaga town is on the same trip. 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 (facilities page: 客室／17室（内、源泉露天風呂付11室）)
Read on: araya-totoan.com/facilities/
Best for: Sleeping beside the spring that the town’s founding legend is about
17 rooms, 11 with a source-fed open-air bath (twin rooms with an open-air bath on the terrace, and Japanese-Western rooms with a half-open-air bath). Check-in 14:00, check-out 11:00. The shared baths run on a time rota between men and women. The inn says its source yields about 100,000 liters a day, the most in Yamashiro, and that its first owner was the domain’s bath keeper. The shop moved in March 2025.
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