Onsen Guide Intro
Welcome to the Hidden Hokkaido Onsen Guide! We’ve included some basic information on Onsen and Sentō on this page, as well as some notes on how we’ve written our guide and general information you should be aware of.
Onsen vs Sentō?
We’re sure that you will have heard of an Onsen before, but what’s this new Sentō word and why does it matter? We hadn’t heard about Sentō’s before either, so it’s a good topic to cover!
In a nutshell, an Onsen and a Sentō are similar, in that they are both styles of public bath available in Japan. The fundamental difference is that an Onsen uses water sourced from a hot spring, whereas a Sentō does not. Often however, the terms will be used interchangeably, and it was only after more than a month in Japan that we even understood that the term Sentō existed!
Therefore, in our guide we’ve just labelled everything under the heading of Onsen, even though now in retrospect we can see that a number of the places we have reviewed would probably be considered Sentō.
You can read more about Sentō here.
Gendered reviews!
We should note that unfortunately when we were visiting, we were an all male group, so our onsen guide is currently limited to the male side of each onsen. We’ve heard that in many cases the women’s side tends to be better (we’re not quite sure why there is a distinction but we’ve heard it mentioned more than once). We’d love to have some reviews of the other side of Hokkaido onsens, so if you’d like to help out, please get in touch!
Etiquette
We’ve put together a very helpful tips page, filled with some really useful information that we wished we had when we were first visiting! One of those pages is our tips on Onsens, which we would recommend reading!