Oniishi Bozu Jigoku is Beppu’s Mud Hell, a volcanic hot spring that erupts with sulphurous hot mud. Close by the Hell is Honbozu, an onsen which feeds off the muddy stink. We decide to go.

Beppu has a couple of mud baths, but the main one offers mixed bathing and we are too uptight to expose our fat, white, female bodies to Japanese scrutiny, so we get up early and go to the women’s mud baths which, depressingly, are much smaller and much less delightful than the men’s. Oh well, they still manage to delight and astound us.

The mud baths are reached via a modern wooden building at the end of a steep little path that winds through a garden. You pay a woman who is wrapped up so thoroughly in clothing that only her eyes peep out from under a wide-brimmed hat. She’s the onsen boss and what she says goes. Through a red curtain is the women’s area. You take off all of your clothes and wash yourself with bowls of water dipped into a hot pool.

Then you teeter down to the mud bath, which is busy and popular with older Japanese women. It’s small, about three by four metres, with room for about six bathers. You can’t see the bottom of the bath, so one of the women guides your foot to a stone step underwater. The bath is hot. It’s not simply muddy, more like a suspension of mud particles in sulphurous water, and every now and again everybody has to get out so that the mud bath boss woman can come and stir it all about with a big rake-like implement.

There is steam, the whole experience is about the heat and the stink. When it gets too much for you, you climb out and rest on one of the benches surrounding the tub, or you can go and rinse yourself off and sit in another, non-muddy tub. Women let the mud dry on their skins, turning them grey.

If you are not Japanese, you will be stared at at this onsen. People will laugh at you for wanting to take a mud bath – why would a western tourist want to do that? The stares are not unkind, however, merely curious, and your fellow bathers will do what they can to communicate with you and help you take the bath properly. If you can speak some Japanese, as Kay can, you might hear the mud patrons talking about how short your hair is, you might want to look them in the eye and tell them that you understand what they are saying, and you might want to laugh along with them when they giggle at being found out.

Take a look at this film I made about visiting Japanese onsen (.mov, 7mb)

Read more about my trip to Japan

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