Kurashiki Kokusai Hotel

KKurashiki Kokusai Hotel stands beside the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, Okayama. Designed by Shintaro Urabe and opened in 1963, it hangs a great Shiko Munakata print in its lobby. We read what a deliberately plain building chose as its luxury.

The Back of the Blocks Has Another Story

In the lobby atrium (a tall space open across several floors) hangs a woodblock print more than 12 metres wide. “From Humankind to the Gods” and “From the Gods to Humankind.” Two phrases pointing in opposite directions are said to have come from the two faces of the same blocks.

The artist is Shiko Munakata. The hotel says the work was first titled “Kenkon-sho – From Humankind to the Gods”. Munakata later used the reverse of the blocks to make “Great World’s Fence (Dai-sekai no saku) – Ken: From the Gods to Humankind” for the Japan Folk Crafts Pavilion (Nihon Mingeikan) at the Osaka World Exposition, and the lobby piece was renamed “Great World’s Fence – Kon”.

The lobby piece took the name of the earth side: kon.

The print hangs in Kurashiki Kokusai Hotel in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, next to the Ohara Museum of Art. The hotel opened on 1 December 1963 and was designed by Shintaro Urabe. Its founder, Soichiro Ohara, was the son of Magosaburo Ohara, who founded the museum, and it was Soichiro who commissioned the print from Munakata.

Munakata called his woodblock prints “hanga”, written with the character for “board” (板画) rather than the usual “block” (版画), to stress the character of the wood. The hotel introduces him as the first Japanese artist to win the international grand prize for prints at the Venice Biennale, in 1956, and bills the lobby piece as his largest work and the largest woodblock print in the world.

Two stories travel with the picture. It is said to let the rhythms of Beethoven’s Ninth and other works echo through its nude figures, a hymn to the art of the gods. It is also said to be rooted in the emotion of seeing Picasso’s Guernica.

The picture is more than 12 metres wide, so it is the first thing that catches the eye on entering the lobby. It can be seen from the 1st floor and also from the rest areas on the 2nd and 3rd floors (Japanese numbering).

The picture is only 1.75 metres high. It is a long band rather than a tall panel, and to take it in from end to end the eye has to travel sideways. Seen from another floor, the same band arrives at a different height.

The building itself is plain. The design aimed to avoid showy glitter and to reach dignity and gravitas. The one luxury the architect’s office records is a pair of works: Munakata’s print in the lobby atrium and Aman-Jean’s mural directly facing the entrance (now in the Ohara Museum’s collection). Both were meant to receive guests.

Why did a hotel that avoided showy glitter entrust its one luxury to art? That is the question of this article.

The Brief Was a Weekend House

The outer walls are white. Slanting wall eaves (surfaces that act as both wall and eave) overlap them, and coloured tiles are used on the exterior. It looks like the white walls and tiles of Kurashiki’s storehouses and townhouses, transposed into a concrete building.

Subtraction outside; in the lobby and at the entrance, additions in the form of pictures only. The hotel’s stance reads in that pairing.

The starting point is a concept from the founder, Soichiro Ohara: “a small hotel of real character, like a weekend house”. The hotel says Urabe designed it to blend Japanese and Western elements so that it would melt into Kurashiki’s local character.

A weekend house is not a place to astonish guests. It is a place to relax. “Small” and “of character” point towards taking things away, not adding them.

Back to the print. In the year the hotel opened, the neighbouring Ohara Museum held completion ceremonies for its Serizawa dyeing gallery and Munakata print gallery. The hotel held its own: completion of the main building, a reception, and an opening ceremony as well. The banquet was held at the hotel. Two new museum galleries and the hotel were unveiled in the same year, one after another.

Set out as a timeline, the hotel that began beside a museum keeps taking on new roles.

The print was meant to grace the lobby. At the same time it looks like a sign that the hotel was born as a continuation of the museum, and the mural at the entrance, now in the Ohara Museum’s collection, supports that view.

The hotel says that many of the works in the museum’s Munakata print room grew out of the deep bond and trust between Munakata and Soichiro. The client who ordered the print and the artist who cut it had a long acquaintance behind them.

The hotel’s chronology records that, from the year after it opened, one notable guest followed another. A seven-day Japan–US citizens’ conference was held here, and a Viennese boys’ and girls’ choir visited. In 1966 Herbert von Karajan performed with his orchestra at Okayama Civic Hall, and 85 people then stayed at the hotel. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Kurashiki and stayed in the same year. A place for local people to relax, a lodging for travellers, a guesthouse for the imperial family and dignitaries: that was the hotel’s role.

The design aimed to avoid showy glitter. Then musicians and philosophers came to stay. One large picture on the wall, a museum next door.

“However much I love, I cannot love enough. … That is what hanga is.” – Shiko Munakata, in the last words he left about his prints (as the hotel presents them)

The Luxury of Repairing and Keeping

The lobby floor is laid with about 7,500 blocks. The coloured roof tiles that have decorated the exterior since the early days number about 2,000. For work to extend the life of the building, including the repair of both, the hotel closed completely in 2019 for the first time since it opened. It reopened on 8 August. Floor and tiles are not ornament; they are parts in daily use.

According to Kuratoco, a local site on Kurashiki architecture, the staircase with its handrail and the wall clock are unchanged since opening. The floor was cleaned of wax by hand, and damaged blocks were replaced with blocks moved from the basement. The plan for the tiles had been to re-lay them all, but they are hard to obtain, so about 200 damaged ones were replaced with tiles taken from parts that cannot be seen, the site writes. Rather than gather new material, the building moves what it already has and keeps going. Such repairs hardly show, and the floor and tiles that have been there since opening go on making the lobby and the exterior what they are today. That is the shape the luxury of a plain building takes.

The guest rooms, by contrast, have changed. Under the main-building renovation plan of 2012, all the rooms on the 3rd floor, then the 2nd, were fully refurbished. The places where a guest can touch the building’s history are, it seems, outside the rooms: the lobby, the stairs and the exterior walls. Come down from a room to the lobby and you stand on the floor that has been there since opening.

In the year of the repairs, a new picture was hung as well. A large painting of Kurashiki’s scenery by Takako Hojo was installed directly facing the entrance. Even when repairing, the lobby remains a place to hang pictures.

Little was visibly added: a handrail around the atrium, cleaning of the eaves and white walls, mould-proofing of the walls, newly displayed paintings. That year’s work was also seismic retrofitting. What was added: a handrail and paintings. What was washed: eaves and walls. Care so that the building could keep being used was the heart of the work, as far as the eye can see.

Look at the print when you check in, and at your feet before you leave next morning. Going down the stairs, rest a hand on the handrail that is original to the building, then compare it with the new rail around the atrium.

Shintaro Urabe and the Town of Kurashiki

Walk out into the Bikan Historical Quarter and, among the white-walled townhouses, Urabe’s buildings stand mixed in. Shintaro Urabe, who designed the hotel, was an architect born in 1909 who died in 1991. He left many buildings in Kurashiki, and the hotel’s white walls are one more along that streetscape.

The branch gallery of the Ohara Museum next door is also by Urabe. In 1974 he converted the former Kurashiki Spinning mill into accommodation and other facilities as Kurashiki Ivy Square. Ivy Square and Kurashiki City Hall (1980) are also recorded in the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ survey as the work of Urabe and his office.

Kurashiki is also a town grown by clients and architects working together. Urabe worked for Kurashiki Kenshoku (now Kuraray) and is said to have supported, from the architectural side, the town planning conceived by its president, Soichiro Ohara. The Ohara Museum’s branch gallery, Kurashiki Kokusai Hotel and Kurashiki Ivy Square are all by Urabe. Kurashiki Kokusai Hotel looks like the building the town put up to receive its guests: something like its front door.

The year of the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize differs by source: the hotel gives 1964, while the architects’ office lists it as the FY1964 prize under 1965. The hotel’s chronology records that in 1967 the hotel was included in the Foreign Ministry’s overseas promotional film “Modern Architecture of Japan”, alongside the Hotel New Otani and the Royal Hotel. The plain building was one of three.

A house that receives guests also receives the townspeople. Delegates from the countries and international organisations at the 2016 G7 education ministers’ meeting in Kurashiki stayed here. In February 2023 a lunch discussion under the Foreign Ministry’s “Regions to the World” project was held at the hotel with the diplomatic corps (the foreign diplomats posted to Japan). After the torrential rains of July 2018 the hotel sent out hot meals to the stricken areas. It lodges people, serves meals, and lends a hand when the town is in trouble. The weekend-house brief seems to have grown into the role of the town’s drawing room.

Back to the opening question. The host of a weekend house does not add furniture; he hangs pictures on the wall. What the plain building chose as its luxury was a greeting hung for its guests. That greeting is still addressed, from the lobby wall, to everyone who comes in.

Three things to see here

「Kon and ken: a story from the front and back of one set of blocks.」

SUMIBIKI Editors

Staying here