Funaoka Onsen

photo by iloverjoa · CC BY 3.0

From 1923, the third public bath in Japan to be registered as an architectural heritage building.

It is not a museum: you pay at the counter, undress and bathe alongside residents of the street. The changing room has period wood carvings; the corridor leading to the baths is lined with coloured majolica tiles, and that is what the municipality points out as worth seeing.

A *sentō*, that is, a neighbourhood public bath with heated water, not a hot spring, even though the name says ‘onsen’. Opened in 1923, it is registered by the state as an architectural heritage building, and the municipality specifies that it was the third public bath in Japan to obtain that registration.

ℹ️ ⚠️ Opening hours, closing day and price are not stated by any official source: the corresponding fields on the municipality's page are empty, and the bath's website, funaokaonsen.net, no longer exists; it answers with a permanent redirect to a third-party domain. That leaves the telephone, 075-441-3735. The ¥430 and the opening hours until one in the morning that circulate are not verified. From Kuramaguchi metro station it is eighteen minutes on foot, from the ‘Senbon-Kuramaguchi’ bus stop six. ⚠️ The wood carvings in the changing room depict scenes from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria: it is worth knowing before you go in.

🚉 Kuramaguchi · 18 min walk

Sources: ja.kyoto.travel

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