NARA - A luxury hotel using the former Nara Prison, a nationally designated Important Cultural Property, will open on June 25, offering rooms from 147,000 yen per night as Japan sees a growing trend of converting historic cultural assets into hotels.
Beyond the prison’s heavy red-brick gate is an expansive luxury space. The hotel, Hoshinoya Nara Prison, was opened to the media on June 23 before its formal launch.
The property was created by renovating the former Nara Prison, which was once used as a juvenile prison. Built during the Meiji era, the site is designated by the national government as an Important Cultural Property.
Hoshino Resorts, which was entrusted by the government with operating rights for the property, spent about seven years renovating the site. The former prison’s symbolic layout, with cell blocks extending radially from a central guardhouse, has been preserved in its original form.
One guest room features red brick left from the Meiji era and has been turned into a suite by connecting 10 former solitary cells. Room rates start at 147,000 yen per night.
In the main lounge, guests can drink tea produced in Nara Prefecture while viewing Japanese-style paintings by a local artist.
Renovating the hotel also brought challenges unique to cultural properties, where modifications are subject to restrictions.
"This window did not originally exist. This space was a warehouse," said Nobuya Kakegawa, general manager of Hoshinoya Nara Prison. "Our theme was to improve the quality of the stay by opening this window and creating a space where guests can deliberately view the outside as if it were framed. We had to explain to the Agency for Cultural Affairs what we wanted to provide to guests, gain its understanding, and only then were we able to cut out the window. There were many difficulties like that."
Similar moves to turn cultural properties into hotels are spreading across Japan.
In Kyoto, the Imperial Hotel Kyoto opened in March next to the Gion Kobu Kaburenjo, the venue for the Miyako Odori, a spring tradition in the city. The hotel uses a nationally registered Tangible Cultural Property, reusing parts of the exterior walls and decorative features of Yasaka Kaikan, a symbol of Gion, to create a 55-room luxury hotel.
In Nagoya, a hotel has also opened inside the city’s television tower, an Important Cultural Property. Guests can view the tower’s exposed steel frame up close, with structural elements visible from below the floor and along the walls.
Experts say the spread of such hotels reflects the high cost of preserving and maintaining cultural properties.
"One bottleneck is that preserving and maintaining cultural properties requires a considerable amount of money," said Yukiko Shinomiya, an associate professor in the Faculty of Business Administration at Kindai University who specializes in hotel management. "Rather than having national and local governments maintain and preserve all cultural properties on their own, there is a strong fit with the idea of using private-sector capital and operational know-how."
The conversion of cultural properties into hotels is likely to expand further as Japan seeks to preserve costly historic assets by turning them into tourism resources.
Source: YOMIURI
