Kyoto Hotel

The Kyoto Hotel was the first purpose-built Western-style hotel in the city. Construction began in 1889, on land purchased from the prefectural government at Kawaramachi–Nijō. As hoped, it was able to open for business before April 1890, when Emperor Meiji visited Kyoto to celebrate the opening of the first stage of the Lake Biwa canal (Kyōto Hoteru 1988, 161).

The first owner Maeda Matakichi (前田又吉), an entrepreneur who had established the Tokiwa (常盤) restaurant in Kobe in 1868, stated that “as far as possible, the imitation of Western architecture should be avoided, and that apart from the dining room and bedrooms, everything should be uniquely Japanese. All the fixtures and ornaments should be in Japanese style, allowing foreign guests to become familiar with Japanese art and, moreover, expanding sales networks” (qtd. in Kyōto Hoteru 1988, 160). Nevertheless, when construction was finally completed sometime after 1894, the hotel looked imposingly Western from the outside and promotions tended to underline the modernity of its facilities above all else.

In the early years, a variety of names were used in English and Japanese for the hotel: Tokiwa, the Tokiwa Hotel, Tokiwa-rō, Kyōto go-ryokan, as well as Kyoto Hotel. The 1891 Murray’s Handbook simply read “Kyoto Hotel, also called Tokiwa, in Kawara-machi.” The death of Maeda in 1893 led to the business (and its huge debts) being taken over by the Yaami Hotel, and it was put under the management of Inoue Kitarō (井上喜太郎), the younger brother of Yaami proprietor Inoue Mankichi. In 1895, in time for the 4th National Industrial Exhibition in Kyoto, the hotel was officially reopened under the “new” name of Kyoto Hotel.

After the Yaami took over, not only was “the whole establishment […] renovated and improved” (Chamberlain and Mason 1891, p. 287) but the business model changed to attract a greater range of guests, including more domestic tourists. In 1914, various classes of rooms were available: special, with sitting room, bedroom, and bathroom; 1st class, with bedroom and bedroom; 2nd class, on the 2nd floor; and 3rd class, on the 2nd and 3rd floors. It cost ¥6–20 for a single room, and ¥12–25 for a double room, on an American plan.

It is often unclear why tourists chose one hotel over another, but one advantage enjoyed by the Kyoto Hotel may have been its convenient position: "We went to the Kyoto Hotel, which we chose in preference to the larger one, the Miyako, as the Kyoto is right in the middle of town and near to everything" (Rideal 1920, p. 28). 

In the following extract (left) from the diary of a longterm British resident in Kobe, Richard Gordon Smith undertakes a somewhat typical anti-tourist denunciation of his fellow guests at the Kyoto Hotel. Nevertheless, it does underline the atmosphere of the hotel at busy times, especially as large tour groups began to come into to Japan from the early 1900s.

In the quotation on the right, published nearly twenty years after Smith’s stay, an American tourist on a trip around east Asia and the Pacific recorded a more positive impression of efficient service at the Kyoto Hotel.

Rebuilding of the Kyoto Hotel

The Kyoto Hotel was rebuilt in 1928, as an eight-storey earthquake-resistant concrete structure. As well as a direct elevator to the top floors and other mod-cons, the redesign also incorporated large banquet rooms, Japanese-style guest rooms fitted with tatami mats, and facilities for the increasingly popular shinzen-style shrine wedding party, suggesting how the hotel was following the transition began under Inoue, away from being a “Western-style” hotel primarily targeting inbound tourists. Nevertheless, the Kyoto hotel continued to be actively marketed to foreign tourists by official agencies like the Board of Tourist Industry into the 1930s and continued to be the second most popular hostelry among foreign visitors to the city, with 3,811 foreign guests in 1936 (compared to 6,035 at the Miyako Hotel and 936 at the Station Hotel) (Kyōto-shi Sangyō-bu Kankō-ka 1937, 20 appendix).