Entry Level Guest Room

An entry-level guest room at Kinugawa Kan is one of the smaller standard rooms in the hotel, set away from the river-view face of the building. The tatami mats are partly uplifted, the matting damp where moisture worked at it from below. A low table sits in the centre, with two zaisu floor chairs pushed against the wall. A folded futon is stacked in the corner. Ferns push through the gap where the matting has lifted; moss spreads across one of the corners of the floor. The shoji panels at the back of the room have lost most of their paper; the timber lattice is exposed. The window above the panels is intact.

Entry-level rooms at Japanese ryokans of Kinugawa Kan's grade slept two on futons, with meals taken in the downstairs dining hall and the baths shared along the corridor. They were the rooms a young couple from Tokyo would book on a two-night midweek stay outside the peak weekend trade. Kinugawa Kan opened in December 1942 and operated through five decades of the post-war ryokan industry. The operating company entered business suspension in June 1999 with debts of around 3 billion yen, the first major Kinugawa Onsen hotel to fall in the post-bubble era. Formal closure followed in 2005. The room has been sealed since.