Ryokan, hotel, yado, Japanese inn, tea house — in name, and on the ground, it was often difficult to distinguish between different categories of tourist accommodation in Japan. Partly this was due to issues of translation between Japanese and English, and negotiations between Edo-period ideas and institutions and Meij-period imports; yet also, the Anglophone tourist world, from which many tourists and guidebook authors hailed, saw an analogous fluidity in names and categories of hostelry in the nineteenth century (cf. James et al. 2017). Hori Tatsunosuke’s (堀 達之助) A Pocket Dictionary of the English and Japanese Language (Ei–Wa taiyaku shūchin jisho 英和対訳袖珍辞書, 1862) translated “hotel” as kakusha (客舎, glossed in kana as yadoya), drawing no distinction between hotels and other types of commercial hostelry. W.E.L. Keeling’s Tourists’ Guide (1880) used “hotel” to refer to structures with “matted rooms” and “native style[s]” of welcome and service (5–6). Even when the hotel appeared in new regulations on inns and businesses in 1888, it was grouped with ryokan in the category of ryojin yado (旅人宿, traveler accommodation); and it was not until 1930, when the Board of Tourist Industry brought forward a petition from the Japan Hotel Association (est. 1909) to the Police Department, that any kind of formal distinction was made on paper.

Nevertheless, from an early point, tourism service providers and their customers developed a shared conception of the “hotel” as something new, something modern, and (at first, at least) something Western. 

Japanese inns

What were typically termed “Japanese inns” in guidebooks — the nascent sociocultural category of “ryokan” — were marketed to foreigners from the beginning of the Meiji period but primarily as a subordinate form of accommodation. 

This began to change in the late 1920s and 1930s, after a lengthy period of reforms in service styles and facilities that was led from the top, by official agencies such as Japan Tourist Bureau and, later, the Board of Tourist Industry. From this period, ryokan were promoted as a repository of traditional Japanese values, and an obligatory experience for all serious travelers to the country. 

This shift in the status and meaning of the ryokan occurred across Japan; nevertheless, as a result of Kyoto’s newly developed identity as the “old capital,” ryokan in the city were given a particularly important role in cultural preservation.