Nyuto Spa Resort — photo: 掬茶 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Are onsen mixed gender? Konyoku in Japan, where it is left, and the rules
No. The onsen you will meet in a normal trip are split by gender: one side for men, one side for women, and you take everything off on your own side. Mixed baths, called 混浴 (kon'yoku), still exist, but they are a small and shrinking part of Japanese bathing, mostly at old inns in the mountains. This guide covers how to tell which kind of bath you are walking into, why the famous towns are not mixed, what the rules are at the places that are, and the age rule that decides where your children bathe.
The short answer for the towns people ask about
People search "is Hakone mixed", "Kusatsu mixed bath", "Kinosaki mixed gender" and the same for Beppu, Arima, Dogo and a dozen other names. The answer is the same for all of them. The public bathhouses in these towns, and the main baths of their hotels and inns, are separated by gender.
- Kinosaki: the seven public bathhouses along the river each have a men's side and a women's side.
- Dogo: the old main bathhouse is split, and so are the newer annexes.
- Kusatsu: the big public baths, including the outdoor bath in the park above the town, are split.
- Hakone: the day-use baths and the inn baths are split. The one place you can bathe with a partner in public there is a large hot-spring park where everyone wears a swimsuit, which is a theme park, not an onsen in the usual sense.
- Kurokawa, Beppu, Yufuin: here the outdoor baths belong to individual inns, and each inn decides. Most baths are split, and a few inns keep a mixed outdoor bath next to a women-only one.
If what you want is to bathe together as a couple or a family, the thing to look for is not a mixed bath. It is a private bath you lock from the inside, booked for an hour, which almost every town has. See private onsen baths.
How to tell which bath you are walking into
The entrance tells you. A split bath has two doors or two curtains, usually red for women, 女 or 女湯, and blue for men, 男 or 男湯. The colours are a habit, not a rule, so read the character. Many inns swap the two sides once a day so both get a turn at the better bath; the sign for that is 入れ替え (irekae), with the time posted. A bath that was the men's side at night can be the women's side in the morning, so read the curtain every time.
A mixed bath is marked 混浴. It often still has two changing rooms, one for each sex, that both open onto the same water. Some mixed outdoor baths are reached only from the women's indoor bath at certain hours, and some have a screened area or a separate small pool for women. The layout is the inn's own, so the sign by that bath is the rule.
A private bath is marked 貸切 (kashikiri) or 家族風呂 (kazoku-buro), often with a sign you turn or a door you lock.
Why mixed baths are rare
Shared bathing without a split was ordinary in Japan for a long time, especially at village baths and at the long-stay inns where farmers came to soak for a week or more after the harvest. Rules separating men and women came in from the Meiji period onward, and today local public bathing rules generally expect separate baths. The mixed baths that are left are mostly old ones, kept at places that had them before the rules tightened.
That is also where they are. In our records, 404 of the 741 onsen places that list a lodging count have exactly one inn, and only 13 list fifty or more. The mixed baths that survive tend to be at that first kind of place: a single old inn up a mountain road, with one big wooden bath or a pool by a river, not a resort town with a street of hotels.
A second reason is behaviour. Some mixed baths closed, or added women-only hours, because men sat in the water and stared at the women's entrance. That problem is the reason many of the rules below exist.
Where you can still find them
The best-known mixed baths are the ones guidebooks repeat, and they are real:
- Sukayu, in the Hakkōda mountains above Aomori, is the classic example. Its big wooden bath, the 千人風呂 (sennin-buro), "thousand-person bath", is mixed, with set women-only hours. Our records list five water types there, including acidic and sulfur. See the Tohoku guide.
- Nyuto, above Lake Tazawa in Akita, where several of the seven inns have mixed outdoor baths, Tsurunoyu's milky pool the best known. See our Nyuto guide.
- Shirahone in Nagano, where the large milky outdoor bath at 泡の湯 (Awanoyu) is mixed. See Shirahone.
- Takaragawa in the mountains of northern Gunma, a single inn whose large riverside outdoor baths are mostly mixed, and which hands out bath wear for them.
- Manganji, near Kurokawa, has a tiny riverside bath beside the road with almost no screening. It is open to anyone, so in practice it is mixed. See the Kurokawa guide.
Rules at all of these change. Women-only hours move, bath wear is introduced or dropped, and a bath can close for repairs for a season. Check the inn's own page or ask at the desk on the day.
The rules at a mixed bath
Everything in our etiquette guide still applies: wash first, no swimsuit unless the bath says so, towel out of the water, keep your voice down. A mixed bath adds a few things.
- Wraps only where allowed. Some mixed baths let women wear a bathing wrap, 湯あみ着 (yuamigi), and some sell or lend them at the desk. Some let you wrap a towel round the body there and nowhere else. Some allow neither. Follow the sign at that bath, not a rule you read about another one.
- Do not look. Face the view, not the entrance. Do not sit by the women's door, and do not move towards someone who has just got in.
- No cameras, no phones. This is true at every onsen and more so here.
- Use the women-only hours as they are meant. If the bath has them, men stay out for that time, and leave a little before it starts.
- Leave if someone is uncomfortable. If a woman comes in alone and the water is full of men, the polite thing is for some of them to get out.
If you would like to try a mixed bath but not in front of strangers, go at an hour when the inn is quiet, in a group you know, or choose an inn that has a women's bath alongside the mixed one so anyone in your group can opt out.
Children: the age rule, lowered from 10 to 7
The question most families actually face is not a mixed bath. It is whether a young child can go into the other parent's side of a split bath. That is set by local rules, and they changed recently. In December 2020 Japan's health ministry lowered the age in its national guideline for public baths: children should not go into the bath of the opposite sex from about age 7, down from about 10. Prefectures and cities then wrote it into their own rules on different dates, from 2021 into 2023, so a few places may still differ.
In practice, a girl of 7 or older goes into the women's side and a boy of 7 or older into the men's side, even with a parent of the other sex. The sign at the entrance usually says it, for example 7歳以上の混浴はご遠慮ください, "no mixed bathing from age 7". A private bath avoids the question completely. See onsen with children.
Three things not to do
Do not walk into the other side because the curtain colour looked right. Read 男 and 女, and read it again after the daily swap.
Do not book a trip around a mixed bath without checking it is still mixed, and still open, this season.
Do not treat a mixed bath as a place to watch people. It is a bath, and the inn will ask you to leave.
New to this? Start with how an onsen stay actually works and onsen etiquette. Bathing together as a couple or family? See private onsen baths. Worried about tattoos? See going to an onsen with tattoos.