Yaami Hotel

For about two decades in the mid to late Meiji period, the Yaami Hotel was the first choice for travellers looking for top-class “Western-style” accommodation in Kyoto. 

The Yaami was established in 1879 by Inoue Manchiku (井上万吉), a former guide from Nagasaki. Inoue took advantage of a government sell-off of confiscated temple and shrine land to buy and convert some of the buildings that had previously formed part of Anyōji’s rokuami tea houses, restaurants, and event spaces. 

As seen below in Ishida Yūnen's Miyako no kai (1883), the original Yaami looked like a typical two-storey Japanese inn and banquet restaurant but its signage (“HOTEL”), forty rooms with gas lamps, and complete Western-style menu distinguished it from the beginning as an expressly new type of service. In 1894, it was redesigned as an imposing four-storey Western-style building. 

For foreign tourists, the Yaami was the first port of call upon arrival in the city and, almost all guests agreed, was a superlative experience, thanks to the well-equipped and comfortable rooms, the excellent service and care, and the unparalleled views of the city. Most of the published travelogues from this period record a stay at the Yaami. Of the hotel’s many distinguished guests, Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, who stayed there in 1890, is perhaps the most well-known. Douglas Sladen described the Duke and Duchess' stay at length in The Japs at Home (1895).

Japanese at the Yaami

Like many of the new-style hostelries that sprang up in Kyoto, it was not only inbound tourists that used the Yaami. For locals, the Yaami was a popular place to eat Western-style cuisine and experiment with new forms of entertainment and leisure. Due to inconsistencies in inbound tourist arrivals — which peaked in spring and summer but dropped dramatically in winter — this trade likely comprised the hotel’s most regular business (Kyōto Hoteru 1988, 150). 

Some of the events held at the Yaami were recorded in local newspapers: an article in the Osaka edition of the Asahi shimbun (January 7, 1887) had high praise for the decision made by a medical association of doctors from Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, Wakayama, and Shiga prefectures to “break with customary practice” for their new year get-together. Instead of choosing to “go to a Japanese restaurant to get plied with alcohol by geisha,” they met at the Yaami at 3pm in the afternoon. After “a series of readings and talks, much like an academic conference,” they had a standing buffet of Western-style food and finished the meeting at 7pm. “Further improvements,” the association informed the newspaper, “are planned for the future.”

The end of the Yaami

In 1899, the Yaami downscaled after a large fire, and finally closed in 1906 after another large conflagration, which also destroyed Yoshimizu Onsen. The land was bought by the city, who used it to extend Maruyama Kōen, established in 1886 as a public park, to its present boundaries (Imai 2019, 137). In that sense, with its destruction as well, the Yaami might be said to have played a final key role in the transformation of Higashiyama into a space of self-consciously modern forms of work and leisure.