Kyoto Station Hotel

The Kyoto Station Hotel was established some years after the other big hotels (the Miyako and Kyoto) that served inbound tourists in the first half of the twentieth century. It opened in 1928, the year of Emperor Shōwa’s enthronement ceremony and the Kyoto Grand Exposition, in front of the east entrance of the second-generation Kyoto Station. 

As Alice Y. Tseng describes, the relocation — from the site where Kyoto Tower stands today — and rebuilding of the station building in 1914 led to a redevelopment and reimagining of the area as an “amusement centre for the general population.” Although the construction only got underway much later, the possibility that the original plan for a station hotel was conceived in 1919 (following the opening of Tokyo’s own Station Hotel four years earlier), would situate the building of the Kyoto Station Hotel within the larger changes taking place during the early decades of the twentieth century, as Karasuma-Shichijō transformed from an “intermediary passage point” into a transportation and leisure hub of the modern city (Tseng 2018, 179).

The Station Hotel was smaller than its two main rivals, with 75 guest rooms (compared to 109 at the Miyako Hotel and 98 at the Kyoto Hotel, in 1933). And it was also, on the whole, a cheaper option, with European-plan rooms for ¥3 to ¥5.50 (compared to ¥3–15) and meals about half the price of rivals (e.g. dinner was ¥1.50 compared to ¥3 at the Miyako and Kyoto hotels) (Japanese Government Railways 1933, 319). Indeed, during the Asia-Pacific War, when the government established price controls on hostelries in 1943, the Station Hotel was classified as a fourth class hotel, and its main two rivals put into the top price tier (Kyōto Hoteru 1988, 245).