Most Japanese Hotels Don’t Want Your Tattooed Body in Their Public Baths

A new survey from the official Japan Tourism Agency finds that 56 percent of Japanese hotels and inns will not permit guests with tattoos into their public bathing facilities, The Japan Times reports. Thirteen percent of hoteliers said they wanted guests’ tattoos to at least be hidden, and fewer than a third thought tattoos were totally cool (31 percent).

Why the hostility? For much of its history, Japan was actually pretty tattoo-friendly. Clay figurines bearing tattoo-like marks have been traced to the Jomon Period, between 10,500 and 300 B.C.E. Tattoos were also popular in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, when working-class Japanese took advantage of the country’s flowering arts scene to critique the country’s military dictatorship—and some of that art ended up on their bodies.