I usually make sure that the onsen (hot springs) I go to has a private bath. I only like being naked in private, even for Japanese onsens.
Suimeikan Karukaya Sanso has a few private baths that you can book per half hour for a fee, but its main bath is an outdoor mixed gender bath that could seat 250 people.
Update: Suimeikan Karukaya Sanso is temporarily closed indefinitely.Wait, naked mixed gender hot springs?
(Thought that doesn’t exist anymore.)
Girls get to wrap a towel around them.
They give out an elasticated bath towel to women.
(It’s rare that you’re allowed to take a towel into the bath.)
What about men…?
…I guess men can use the small and thin onsen face towels that everyone gets…?
The Bath
So the official way of getting to the big bath for men, was to go there directly through the main bath entrance. For women, we’re supposed to go to the women’s outdoor bath, then walk around (already naked with a towel) to the mixed big bath.
Pretty awkward and kind of a muddy route. If there’s a next time, I’d just go in the main bath entrance like men, when there are no men entering the dressing room. (I saw practically no-one, hence the photos.)
The main onsen is one of the largest outdoor hot springs in Japan.
It was indeed huge; it even had a cave section around the corner.
The temperature of the water varied from spot to spot, which was great – I could stay in a spot that wasn’t too hot for an extended period of time.
Because I saw no-one (it was about 11pm) and the elasticated towel was getting somewhat uncomfortable, I eventually just took it off and swam around freely.
But err, eventually one man did come to have a bath as I was at the closer edge reaching out for my drink bottle. He saw me, got scared, left and never ever came back. Sorry! (I was shocked too.)
The bath was open 24h for those who stay over. After I left the onsen after midnight near 1am, a small young group seem to have gone in.
The front of the lodge has a sign of who is staying that night; and it looked like 9 groups were staying including us, so it’s quite miraculous that I bumped into (practically) no one at the big onsen at night!
The next morning, I saw a couple of women and a man in the main onsen. Here’s the secondary onsen in the morning.
And by the way, one of the private onsen baths looked like this – we ordered a pickles and sake set (floating in the tub).
Food & Accommodation
Dinner was a lovely shabu shabu with Hida-gyu beef, and brekkie included warming up your own fish on a mini table cooker. 😁
Our rooms were spacious, but being a ‘sanso’ rather than a ‘ryokan’, the toilets were shared. But the shared bathroom aspect really wasn’t an issue.
You do realise in the morning that there’s another lodge nearby, and you start to wonder what they might’ve seen while you were in the bath… Binoculars, anybody?
That said, the whole experience was marvelous. I never thought I’d go to a mixed bath onsen in the wild open. But being able to take a towel and that it was so empty made it an amazing experience.
Getting there & Along the way
It’s actually a little tricky to get to. From Takayama Station in Gifu prefecture, you catch the Nohi Bus heading towards Shin-Hotaka, get off at Karukaya bus stop and walk for 3 mins. It’s about 1.5h bus ride.
Nearby is Shin-Hotaka Ropeway which offers spectacular Japanese alps mountain views.
We went there twice – both before and after the hot springs, because there was an amazing bakery up there with a croissant in the sky.
The bakery is called アルプスのパン屋さん (Bakery in the Alps) and is at Shikaraba-Daira Station of the ropeway cable car.
You can’t accidentally bump into Karukaya Sanso or the Shin-Hotaka Ropeway, so it’s a 🥇 (=plan a trip around it) on #myrevisitlist when the onsen re-opens.
Note: Suimeikan Karukaya Sanso is temporarily closed indefinitely.[Photos taken April 2014]
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