Ginzan Onsen Fujiya

RRyokan Fujiya stands in Ginzan Onsen, Obanazawa, Yamagata. Designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates and reopened in July 2006, it is a renovation of a timber inn that became a three-storey building in the Taisho era. How far did the architects change it, and how far did they leave it as it was?

Put a Hand to the Wall, and a Door Appears

No doorknob. No pull. No room number. The tale “Second Story” on the Ryokan Fujiya website describes the corridor from a guest’s point of view. The building, it begins, has none of the signs you would expect in a ryokan. “To be precise, there is only an ‘emergency exit’.” The guide puts a hand to the wall, and a door appears. It had been there all along, but until it was noticed it was a wall.

Without a knob or a pull, the wall looks like a single surface. The door hides in it as a seam. The guest may stop looking for a door and start reading a wall.

The inn is in Ginzan Onsen, Obanazawa, Yamagata Prefecture, and was designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates. It was founded in the Edo period and made a three-storey timber inn in the Taisho era, and it carries the note “fourth generation”. The rebuilding took place in May 2005, and the inn reopened in July 2006.

So this is not a new building. The old building had grown dilapidated. The architects renovated it by reusing the timber that could still be used. A renovation, not a rebuild.

As of October 2026 there are eight guest rooms, all facing the Ginzan River, and five baths, all private. Before any of those, though, the guest in the tale meets a corridor without signs and a door that looks like a wall.

When a modern architect renovates an old timber inn, the wish to keep the old and the wish to create a new experience pull against each other. At Fujiya the balance seems to reach as far as the corridor the guest walks along.

The question of this article is a single one: how far did the architects change this old timber inn, and how far did they leave it?

Until Timber Inns Lined the Valley

Cars cannot enter the hot-spring town; from the car park near the entrance it is about eight minutes on foot to the inn. In the valley, on both banks of the river, timber inns of three and four storeys stand shoulder to shoulder. Ginzan Onsen lies in the mountains of Obanazawa, and its name comes from the Nobesawa silver mine, which flourished in the early Edo period. The town is known for its Taisho-romance streetscape.

Why did similar multi-storey timber inns end up side by side? Trace it back and you reach a flood and hot water. The bathing town once had thatched single-storey and two-storey lodgings, and a great flood of the Ginzan River washed most of them away. Later, when boring at the source struck hot water in large volume, the inns all rebuilt, at about the same time, as Western-style timber buildings of three or four storeys.

After the flood came the hot water, and the inns were rebuilt. The rows of multi-storey timber inns along the river look like the trace of that recovery: a valley washed away once, and made again.

Protection of the streetscape followed. After the war the Western styling settled down and exteriors moved closer to a Japanese look. Then came an ordinance, meant to preserve inns of character and use them to revive tourism. Fujiya’s rebuilding came about twenty years later.

So what did the architects do to the dilapidated building? The office says it began by taking away all the concrete construction added later. Then they tried to return, as far as possible, to the delicacy of the original timber building. Before adding, they subtracted.

According to the office’s English text, the exterior is the existing façade, renovated with wood from the original inn. The façade is the face a building presents to the street. The interior was reorganised by inserting an atrium, a vertical void that joins several floors into one space.

What the inn points to as traces of the old is twofold. One is the Type B room: ten Japanese-style mats with a hiroen, a narrow strip of floor along the window, on the third floor. Taisho-era beams can be seen in the ceiling, and the page adds: “Please sleep, feeling the passage of time.” The other is the underground bath, which stands ‘exactly where Fujiya’s bath used to be’.

Taisho beams above, the old bath’s site below: traces of old Fujiya seem to survive in those two places.

Layering Thin Membranes

So what was added once the subtracting was done? Kengo Kuma, who designed the building, writes in the inn’s facilities text (our translation): “When designing this building, I kept thinking about how to overlay. To overlay time, and to overlay space. Using thin filters, I devised a mechanism that overlays this side of the filter with the far side.”

The filters here are not a figure of speech. They are real things, bamboo and glass. There are two. One is a bamboo screen called sumushiko. The other is a pale green stained glass called verdâtre.

Fujiya’s sumushiko used 30,000 poles of madake bamboo from Oita Prefecture, each split into fine strips. A master carpenter from Kanazawa and his son fixed it in place on site, strip by strip. Unlike an ordinary sumushiko, the strips are not bound with thread; they are pinned to a timber base, with adhesive alongside. Without thread, each strip seems to stand on the base as a line. It is closer to a gathering of lines than to a surface, and light passes between them.

In the office’s English text, the bamboo screen surrounds the atrium and, being neither transparent nor opaque, brings soft light and shade into the interior, a space for healing that complements bathing in the hot spring.

The glass is hand-blown, from Saint-Gobain of France, and was etched by the stained-glass artist Masato Shida. Its colour is a pale green. Verdâtre is said to be the colour reached by Cistercian monks of the Middle Ages, famed for their strictness, in their pursuit of the ultimate “clear glass”. The glass runs the entire length of the ground floor.

The surface of the glass is roughened with hydrofluoric acid. In the inn’s explanation, dust in the air then acts on that rough surface and produces a variety of corrosion. It reads as glass finished with the help of time, which looks like an example of what Kuma means by overlaying time.

Walls and sliding doors are covered in handmade Echizen washi, made from kozo and mitsumata with the “ochimizu” technique that gives the surface its unevenness. Because the walls are handmade paper, the inn asks guests not to smoke in the rooms.

In the concept section of its greeting page, the inn calls the interior: “Nothing unnecessary, nothing necessary. Even the entrance is hard to find.” These are the inn’s words, not the architect’s.

A corridor without signs and a thin layer that lets light through: the two seem to work by not showing, turning the guest’s eye to the object.

The baths follow the same idea of layers. The Bamboo bath has bamboo side walls and a breeze through a bamboo lattice. The Sky bath is a roofed, half open-air bath where the lattice can be moved to make the space you like. Then Cedar, Stone and Underground. Each has its own character.

The building was not finished with the rebuilding. The Cedar bath was worked on in 2018 and the Sky bath in 2021. Since it reopened, the baths have gone on being worked on.

Look at the sumushiko once from the front and once from an angle. Go close enough to the glass to see the roughened surface. Changing angle and distance is how you find that there are two thin layers, not one. The sumushiko is made of lines and the glass is a plane; compare two layers of different character.

Kengo Kuma and an Architecture of Overlaying

Kengo Kuma was born in 1954 and founded Kengo Kuma and Associates in 1990. As of October 2026 he is a Special Professor and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo, among other posts, and projects are under way in more than 50 countries. Fujiya is a work of that office.

Naming one designer hides some of the people involved. Fujiya’s team includes Makoto Shirahama (a former staff member), with Nakata Structural Design Office for structure and P.T. Morimura and Associates for facilities. The builder was Aiwa Kensetsu. The renovation was the work of several specialists.

The office lists Shinkenchiku (September 2006) among its publications, and the DFA Design for Asia Awards 2008 Grand Award and an IALD International Lighting Design Award of Excellence as prizes.

Fragile things seem to sit at the centre of this building; Fujiya’s wager may lie there. Kuma’s text ends by asking that the two delicate filters be looked after. When “the feeling of caring for weak things” is overlaid, one after another, over time, “objects will begin to give off a deeper glow”.

Back to the opening question. The boundary did not lie in the position of any wall. It lay in the passage of light. The old timber stayed, and in front of it were laid layers thin enough to be easily hurt.

The last section of the Second Story, “Taisho × Heisei Roman”, begins by leaving the inn’s judgement to a hundred years from now.

A hundred years from now, it may be called Heisei Roman. – Ryokan Fujiya, “Second Story” (the inn’s English)

What will carry those hundred years today is the behaviour of the guest. The sumushiko and the glass are so thin that even the architect asks guests to look after them. The last layer of this inn is the way a guest rests a hand.

Three things to see here

「To overlay time, and to overlay space.」

Kengo Kuma, in a text on the facilities page of Ryokan Fujiya’s website (our translation)

Staying here