Hotel Tokoen

BBy the sea at Kaike Onsen in Yonago, Tottori, the main building of Hotel Tokoen, designed by Kiyonori Kikutake, has stood since 1964. Six clustered columns lift a great beam from which two floors of guest rooms hang, above an open sky garden on the fourth floor. A registered cultural property, it has been closed since January 2024.

Six clustered columns by the sea

Walk through Kaike Onsen towards the sea, and beyond the low buildings of the spa town a grey mass of concrete appears. Thick columns rise from the ground and hold up a great beam at the top. Beneath that beam, floors of guest rooms hang in the air. This is the main building of Hotel Tokoen.

Tokoen is a ryokan said to have opened in Kaike Onsen in the early Showa era. Its main building was completed in 1964 to a design by Kiyonori Kikutake, an architect at the heart of the movement later known as Metabolism. It is built of steel-reinforced concrete, with one basement level and seven storeys above ground, and it faces the Sea of Japan.

On 27 October 2017 the main building was registered as a national Tangible Cultural Property. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as “the culmination of Metabolist architecture”.

From outside, the first thing you notice is the columns. Around one thick main column stand three subsidiary columns, tied together by horizontal members. There are six of these clustered columns, known as kumibashira. They render the joinery of timber structures such as torii gates in concrete. They are said to follow the great torii that stands in the sea at Itsukushima Shrine, and some researchers think Izumo Taisha was also in mind.

The canopy over the front entrance is also built of columns and beams, like a small echo of the whole building. The main building has long been known by another name, Tendai.

Yet these columns do not carry the whole building. The fifth and sixth floors hang from the beam above them. Why did Kikutake hang the floors from above instead of supporting them from below? That is the question this story asks.

One thing must be said first. Tokoen has been closed since January 2024, and as of October 2026 we could find no announcement of its reopening. You cannot stay here now; you can only look up at the building from outside. Even so, it is worth the trip to Kaike to see it.

Floors hung from above

Take the structure step by step. The six clustered columns carry a huge beam about 20 metres above the ground. From that beam hang the floors of the guest rooms on the fifth and sixth floors. The hangers are prestressing steel bars, roughly 16 to 24 mm thick, set about 4 metres apart: high-strength steel rods that are strong in tension. On the room side they are hidden behind timber finishes.

Below the suspended rooms, the fourth floor has no rooms at all. With no columns or walls, a storey covered only in gravel is left open as a “sky garden”. Seen from the front, it looks as if a hole has been cut through the middle of the building, and the sea breeze passes through it. The ground floor is also a piloti level, open between columns, so the building has two tiers of pilotis, a form sometimes called the first and last of its kind in the world.

The lobby and banquet halls on the first to third floors stand on columns from below. Above and below, the floors are held in completely different ways. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that this structure “achieves a different plan on every floor”. Freed from the position of columns, each storey can take its own layout. Here is the first answer to our question.

The architect Toyo Ito, who worked in Kikutake’s office, has called this the building that struck him most in his life. A report on the symposium marking its registration quotes him: “The feeling of a suspended floor was clearly different from that of a floor supported by columns.”

The columns and beam are not the only things to see. The Agency for Cultural Affairs also points to “outstanding structural design in the stairs and elsewhere”. A lift and stair tower is attached to the outside, and the lobby atrium projects outwards; the glazed stairwell shows its shape from the street. Of the stairs, Ito has said, “Normally you would never attach stairs like this,” and he counts it as the building’s brilliance that Kikutake kept adding element after element to a powerful frame of columns and beams, and pulled them all together.

The columns hold up from below; the beam hangs from above. Two paths of weight run through one building.

The garden, and the hotel today

The lobby is glazed on all sides, and a Japanese garden spreads beyond the windows. It was made by the sculptor Masayuki Nagare: a stroll garden around a pond of about 3,000 tsubo (roughly one hectare), known as the “Seven Gardens of Tokoen”. The bathhouse wing built in 1983 was also designed by Nagare.

The seven include the main “Tendai Garden”, named after the main building; the “Wind Garden”, which is the fourth-floor sky garden; and gardens seen from the large baths and open-air bath, such as the “Kuruwa”, “Cloud” and “Dyed” gardens. Even the empty storey inside the building counts as one of the gardens. Guests take in garden and building together, from their room windows and from the baths.

When the hotel was open, the clustered columns stood inside the lobby itself, furnished with rattan chairs designed by Isamu Kenmochi. The Sky Room on the seventh floor is glazed all round. The guest rooms are tatami rooms, and there is a state room said to have hosted Emperor Showa during an imperial visit. Guests slept on suspended floors and could step out into the sky garden on the fourth floor.

The building has changed hands twice. In October 2010 it was acquired by Benefit Hotel, part of the Kansha Group of Fukuyama, Hiroshima. It was this company that applied for the registration as a cultural property, in order to preserve the building. In November 2017, the month after registration, a symposium with Toyo Ito was held in the lobby to mark it.

In January 2024, however, Tokoen closed. In April that year a local newspaper reported that the closure would be extended to July because repairs to its facilities had fallen behind. That summer a local business weekly reportedly wrote that there was no prospect of funding major repairs for the ageing building, and that it was being used as a dormitory for a high-school sports team. The official website is down, and as of October 2026 the major booking sites list no plans.

If the day comes when you can stay again, spend a night in a room on the fifth or sixth floor. Sleep on a hanging floor, then step out in the morning into the fourth-floor sky garden and feel the sea wind pass between the floor overhead and the gravel underfoot. Until then, you look up from the street at six columns and the empty storey in the middle.

Kiyonori Kikutake and Metabolism

Kiyonori Kikutake was born in 1928 in Kurume, Fukuoka. He studied architecture at Waseda University and in 1958 built his own house, Sky House, in Bunkyo, Tokyo: a single square room lifted into the air on four wall-columns. The idea of holding rooms away from the ground carries through to Tokoen. In 1960 he and his peers launched Metabolism, a movement that thought of buildings as living things that renew themselves.

The San’in region has many of his buildings: the Shimane Prefectural Museum (1958), the administration building of Izumo Taisha completed a year before Tokoen (1963), the Shimane Prefectural Library (1968), and, late in his career, the Shimane Art Museum (1998). At Izumo Taisha he spanned great prestressed concrete beams and worked with Masayuki Nagare, who would make Tokoen’s garden. That building no longer stands.

Metabolism divides a building into a permanent frame and parts that can be replaced. At Tokoen, the six columns and the great beam are the frame, and the guest-room floors hung from it are the contents. Hanging the floors from above was also a way of making visible the split between a fixed frame and contents that can change. It is also why each storey can take a different plan. This is the second answer to our question.

Kikutake died in 2011 at the age of 83. The main building has passed sixty and now stands closed. A building designed to metabolise is waiting for its next renewal. The administration building at Izumo can no longer be seen. Tokoen still stands by the sea at Kaike.

Three things to see here

「The feeling of a suspended floor was clearly different from that of a floor supported by columns.」

Toyo Ito (quoted in LIFULL HOME’S PRESS, 2018; translated by SUMIBIKI)

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