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rai · Joined: 19 Jun 2005 Posts: 119 Location: Osaka

The quality of the gym(s) you may have access to will depend greatly on where you are. I live in downtown Osaka, and am within walking distance of Tipness in Namba. Yeah, it's a little pricey (I have the area membership. which gives me access to all the Osaka locations. It's about 12,500 yen/month), but it has great weights, nice pool, and decent cardio machines. They have a lotta olympic weights and dumb-bells going up to 75 kilos.

I did some time in Nagano, and I was miserable. My gym was an hour and a half away, and cost about 10,000 yen/month, in spite of having crappy weights and ANCIENT cardio machines. The local public rec center was cheap, but only had adjustable dumb-bells, and no full-size olympic benches. Ya ever tried to do dumb-bell presses with adjustable dumb-bells? No fun if you lift ANY kinda weight.

And the tattoos...Sorry man, but you are bit fu!"ed in that department. You have to keep them covered. Some other people on this thread were getting snotty about the Japanese attitude towards tattoos, but sorry man, different country, different ideas, ya know? Back home they may be considered a form of self expression, or body art, or what have you, but not here. The "no tattoo" policies are to keep disruptive yakuza types outta the club (I can't complain about THAT.) To the Japanese way of thinking, they must be consistent and ban ALL tattoos. If they didn't, the yakuza could raise hell about the policy being selectively enforced.

It may suck, but there ain't nothin' you can do about it.

As for buying weights and lifting at home, I wouldn't recommend it unless you live out in the country. If you're in the country you might have enough room at home to lift, and you might be a long way from the gym.