The sign on every Japanese hot spring (湯 and ♨)

If you see a big ゆ on a doorway curtain, or the symbol ♨, there’s a hot bath right there. ゆ is the reading of 湯 (yu), hot water, and ♨ is a round bath with steam rising from it. 湯 itself is water, 氵, next to 昜, the sun shining down.

What 湯 says

湯 (yu, or tou) means hot water. On the left, 氵 is the water radical. On the right, 昜 shows the sun, 日, with its rays below it. Water with the sun on it is a lovely way to picture warm water, and it’s the picture in the video. But 昜 was chosen mostly for its sound in old Chinese, not its meaning. The Shuowen Jiezi, a Chinese dictionary from around 100 CE, defines 湯 simply as “hot water”.

Japanese keeps a distinction English doesn’t. 水 (mizu) is cold or room-temperature water, and お湯 (oyu) is hot water. So in Japanese you don’t ask for “hot water”, you ask for お湯. 湯 also means a hot bath, which is why it ends up on the door.

The curtain and the sign

The cloth hanging over a bathhouse entrance is a 暖簾 (noren). At a 銭湯 (sentou), a neighbourhood public bath, or at a hot-spring inn, it often says ゆ or 湯 in big letters. Inside, the baths are split in two: 男湯 (otokoyu), the men’s bath, and 女湯 (onnayu), the women’s. Learn 男, man, and 女, woman, before you walk through.

♨ is the standard hot-spring symbol on Japanese maps and signs. It has been in Unicode since 1993 and became an emoji in 2015, so it’s on your phone’s keyboard too: ♨️.

Not every ゆ means a natural hot spring, though. A 銭湯 usually heats its own water in a boiler room, and it hangs the same ゆ over its door. Either way, a hot bath is waiting.

温泉: a warm spring

温 (on, or atatakai) means warm. Today it looks like water, the sun and a dish, but the sun wasn’t always a sun. In older forms that part was a person inside a frame. One modern reading of the whole right side is a person sitting in a tub (皿) of warm water, which is exactly what you’re about to do; the Shuowen Jiezi instead saw a prisoner being fed from a dish.

泉 (sen, or izumi) is a spring. Its modern shape looks like 白, white, over 水, water, and white water bubbling up is an easy way to remember it. In fact it began as a drawing of water coming out of a crack in a rock, and the top has nothing to do with 白.

Put them together and 温泉 (onsen) is a warm spring: a natural hot spring, and also a hot-spring resort.

How to use it

• お湯をください。

  Oyu o kudasai.

  Some hot water, please.

• お風呂のお湯が熱すぎる！

  Ofuro no oyu ga atsusugiru!

  The bath water's too hot!

• 週末は温泉に行きます。

  Shuumatsu wa onsen ni ikimasu.

  I'm going to a hot spring this weekend.

• 男湯はこちらです。

  Otokoyu wa kochira desu.

  The men's bath is this way.

• 露天風呂、気持ちいい！

  Rotenburo, kimochi ii!

  This outdoor bath feels so good!

• Wash first, then soak. At an onsen or a sentou, everyone washes and rinses at the taps before getting into the hot water.
• Towels stay out of the bath. Dipping your towel in the water is against the rules; people fold it and rest it on their head.
• Tattoos can be a problem. Many onsen don’t allow them, so check before you go.
• 湯 turns up in other bath words: 湯船 (yubune), the bathtub, and 湯気 (yuge), steam.

Words with the same kanji

Remember it

Water (氵) with the sun on it (昜) is 湯, hot water. When you see it on a curtain, or see the steaming bath of ♨, a hot bath is waiting.

The kanji in this lesson

Tap Draw it to watch the stroke order. Numbers show where each stroke starts.

Draw it

Draw it

Draw it

Sources

• Wikipedia: Onsen
• Wikipedia: Sentō
• Emojipedia: ♨️ Hot Springs

Written by the Chirami team with the help of AI, then checked against JMdict and KANJIDIC2. How we write lessons. Spotted a mistake? Email support@brightsmilesolutions.org.