I’ll tell you about the scariest thing to happen to be since coming to Japan. I’m a big fan of public baths and hot springs, and I learned early on that you can travel around Japan cheaply by staying at “saunas,” which are 24-hour public baths that also offer traditional saunas as well as a communal room for customers to sleep in. They’re cheap, costing around $30 to stay in the heart of a large city, and it can be fun to strike up conversations with the other patrons, who are often so surprised to see a gaijin in a place like that that they’ll buy you a beer. All public baths, hot springs and saunas post signs that forbid customers with tattoos from entering, which is intended to keep yakuza (Japanese mafia) out of family-friendly establishments. The first time I went to Kyoto, I thought it’d be fun to stay in a sauna, but I hadn’t realized at the time that Kyoto is a hotbed of these yakuza types, and the sauna I’d decided to stay at was filled to the brim with scary-looking gangsters with full-body tattoos and various scars all over their bodies. I tried to make the best of the situation, pretending not to notice the scary looks I was getting while I took in my surroundings. It was easy to pick out which man was the oyabun (yakuza boss), since he was the one getting his back washed vigorously by his underlings (kobun), who fell over themselves to do anything he wanted. Incidentally, if you have a tattoo you can still come to Japan: the signs aren’t directed at you, and non-yakuza Japanese with tattoos just ignore the rule, too. (Incidentally, J-List stocks several cool magazines of Japanese tattoos if you’re interested.)
