A family that arrived in Kyoto from Fukui in the transport and seafood trade, and only became innkeepers a generation later. Kawabata wrote here. The building is a registered cultural property. There is no view and nothing to prove.
The date, and why we are being careful with it
Hiiragiya gives its founding as 1818, and states that more than two hundred years have passed since. But the house is precise about something most write ups flatten, and it is worth preserving. Shogoro I came down to Kyoto from Fukui and set up in transport and seafood shipping. He was not an innkeeper. It was the second generation, Shogoro II, also called Sadajiro, who changed the business: he had mastered sword guard decoration under the trade name Hiiragiya Masanuki, and in 1861 he opened Hiiragiya Ryokan, which then became the family's primary business. So the family dates from 1818 and the inn from 1861. Both are true and they are not the same sentence, and anyone tidying this into "an inn since 1818" is tidying away the more interesting half.
The name
It comes from the Hiiragi shrine within the grounds of Shimogamo Shrine, where holly grew naturally and was held to repel evil. The ancestors honoured the place and took the name from it. Hiiragiya is the House of Holly. It is a small thing and it is the sort of small thing that turns out to explain a house: a family that took its trading name from a shrine rather than from a founder or a street.
Two buildings, and they are not the same experience
The Main Building is two storeys of wood in the traditional sukiya-zukuri style of tea house architecture from the late Edo to the early Showa period, and the house states it holds sixteen rooms. Its guest rooms are numbered rather than named, running from 14 up into the thirties. The New Wing is a three storey reinforced concrete building in Japanese style, holding seven rooms, one of them with futon beds, described by the house as contemporary Japanese spaces that bring traditional natural materials and fine craftsmanship into new designs. The house does not publish a total and we have not added one. If the reason you are coming is the architecture, it is the Main Building or it is not worth the fare.
Who wrote here
The house records that it has hosted writers, artists, politicians, scientists and members of the imperial family, and names two: Yasunari Kawabata, the Nobel laureate, and Junichiro Tanizaki, both of whom treated it as a sanctuary away from home. That is a specific and checkable claim rather than a general one about famous guests, and it is the right way round. A ryokan that can name the two novelists who worked in its rooms is telling you what kind of quiet it keeps.
The practical half
The building is designated a National Registered Tangible Cultural Property. Check in is three in the afternoon and check out is eleven. It stands at Nakahakusancho, Fuyacho Anekoji-agaru, in Nakagyo-ku, and reception answers the telephone from eight in the morning to nine at night, which makes it straightforward to call from Europe in the morning. Two things we have not printed. The number of generations, and the proprietress's name: both appear in secondary coverage and neither is on any page we could open. And August trading is not confirmed. There is no closure, maintenance or Obon notice anywhere we could read, and ryokan of this age do close for maintenance, so it is a call worth making rather than an assumption worth carrying.
At a glance
The TGC view
Aman Kyoto built a house that looks out at this city. Hiiragiya has been inside it since 1861, on a corner in Nakagyo, with no view to speak of. It is the answer when the requirement is the city itself rather than a retreat from it, and the Main Building is the only part of it we book for that reason. We confirm trading before anyone commits to a date.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
Visit website ↗The newest building in this issue by more than a century, standing on the shore of the Alster inside the city. It is also the house that publishes least about itself, and we have written it accordingly.
Read the review →Behind a gate on Kantstrasse that most people walk past, two buildings that used to try women and then hold them. Grüntuch Ernst finished the conversion in 2022. The rooms were cells, and the house neither hides that nor sells it.
Read the review →A walled garden at the foot of Hidari Daimonji, half an hour north of Kyoto Station, with twenty six rooms in it and sixteen UNESCO sites within reach. The point of the house is that it is not among them.
Read the review →