Many people have heard that Hot Springs, public pools, and even some restaurants and hotels in Japan don't allow guests to enter if they have tattoos. What's the real reason behind this?

Origins

While it's believed that Japanese people have been getting tattoos for over 2000 years now, the more recent history may help explain this curious rule. During the Nara Period (700s) people were subjected to tattoos as a form of punishment if they were caught committing a crime. Fast forward to the Edo period (1600s to 1800s), they even went as far as tattooing words like 'BIG DOG' on the foreheads of criminals. Eventually, they stopped all this and made tattoos illegal, both for punishment and style up until 1948. So we can see that there was quite a negative stigma towards tattoo in Japan up to this point.

Yakuza

Even before tattooing was decriminalized, the Japanese mafia, Yakuza, started getting full-sleeved elaborate tattoos as a part of their initialization. This fact, compounded with the already negative image of tattoos in Japan, caused the average Japanese person to feel somewhat fearful whenever they saw someone with tatts.

Public Bathing

Back in the day, many homes in Japan didn't have a bath, and so public bathhouses were an essential part of daily life. People would go to public bathhouses, and if they saw someone there who had a tattoo, they would apparently quiver in fear, and run to complain to the bathhouse owner. From then until now, Japanese people hate receiving complaints, and try to go above and beyond to avoid it, and this led to the eventual ban of tattoos in public bathhouses and Hot Springs.

Modern Attitudes towards tattoos

I've been living in Japan for over 10 years now, and I've seen many Japanese people with tattoos - about half of my friends here. It's probably still not as popular as it is in the west, however it has definitely lost the strong association with criminality. Yes, the Yakuza still do have their elaborate tattoos, but most people who have tattoos these days are not Yakuza, and heck, Yakuza are allowed everywhere else anyways. The rule is simply outdated, but Japan can be quite slow to change old rules, especially if they don't have a very pressing reason to. To my tattooed readers, fear not, I have found a hidden gem, a fully natural mountain hot spring facility in the west side of Tokyo that allows all kinds of tattoos. If you want to escape the city rush downtown, spend a day in the beautiful mountains of West Tokyo, and cap it off with a refreshing soak in the Hot Springs, click here.