The Whole Town Can Be Your Hotel

After residing in Kyoto for a few years, I started to feel a bit tired of it. Driven by the growing number of tourists, the city keeps building facilities like hotels, ryokan, and Kyoto-themed restaurants and bars. These so-called Kyoto themed places simply borrow the most superficial elements of the city’s stereotypes without demonstrating any of its genuine charisma. There are also plenty of pharmacy selling medicines and beauty products, as well as international brands that set up their Kyoto branch hoping to make money from the tourists. The most authentic face of the ancient city is getting overshadowed.

HAGI Studio saw similar issues in Tokyo — as the Olympic Games are fast approaching, more and more hotels have sprung up in the city to accommodate the upcoming surge of tourists. This has brought harm to the local culture as well as the way of living. To the locals, the influx of infrastructure for tourism means compromising their original style of living, so how can they make a balance between tourism and local life? To respond to the need for allowing tourists to experience the local culture while letting the locals interact and co-exist with the travelers, HAGI Studio came up with an answer by opening the Hotel Hanare.

Located in the Yanaka area in Tokyo, Hotel Hanare provides the guests with rooms, sento (baths), restaurants, souvenir shops, bicycle rental, and cultural experiences. This may sound more or less like a conventional hotel, but the difference lies in the fact that these facilities are not set inside the hotel building. They are, instead, scattered around the neighborhood and operated by various people. Hotel Hanare simply turned the entire neighborhood into a hotel.

Staying in Hotel Hanare, the guests would be awakened by the morning bells ringing from the nearby temple, before visiting the restaurant run by HAGI Studio for breakfast. Afterward, it is time to head to the bike shop in the neighborhood to rent a bike to ride around for the day. For music lovers, they can go to Com So Koya to learn how to play shakuhachi, the traditional bamboo flute. Feeling a little nostalgic? Light and Place is where you can take a portrait using the old collodion process. After a long tiring day, guests can use the complimentary sento ticket to have a nice hot bath in any of the sentos in the neighborhood. Hanare is in a sense a hotel cooperated with the local residents. Guests are invited to actually experience the everyday life of the locals.

Travelling is to experience the local culture; it would be such a shame if tourism develops to a point where the authenticity of the city is negatively affected. Hotel Hanare could well be one of the solutions to the adverse impact of tourism. But at the end of the day, perhaps the real resistance to the potential damage brought by tourists still has to rely on the locals’ determination in protecting their own culture.