Views from the Miyako Hotel

After opening in 1900, the Miyako Hotel quickly eclipsed the Yaami as the top hotel in the eastern hills, a position it maintained for at least the next four decades. As a writer in the Times exclaimed: “in point of importance [the Miyako Hotel] takes the place of the picturesque old Yaami Hotel […] if one is not content here, with the innumerable charms of Kyoto to gaze at from the windows […] there is little hope of happiness” (“The Hotels of Japan,” July 19 1910, 69).

With its location higher up Higashiyama in the Kachō foothills, the viewing practices that had emerged around the Yaami arguably reached their apotheosis at the Miyako. Postcards and other advertising drew attention not only to what could be seen from the hotel, but the where and the who of touristic viewing as well, representing Japanese guests — as well as foreign — as practitioners of this avowedly modern practice.