Japan’s beautiful ryokans are lying empty as the country still keeps tourists out over Covid fears

Michael Fitzpatrick

Tokyo: Gazing disconsolately at a £6,000 Japanese cedar bathtub is the svelte figure of kimono-clad general manager Taisuke Yajima.

He is wilting slightly in the soupy Kyoto summer. The wooden tub, golden and fragrant, is empty save for a shallow lozenge of water. All around is the scent of cedar and rose incense pervading the air of these ancestral Japanese chambers.

“Without regular use traditional Japanese baths like this crack, so the water you see is a necessity. And as each one is handcrafted, that would be a crime,” explains Mr Yajima in the delicate light now flitting through the rice-paper shoji windows of hotel Sowaka.

His charge belongs unmistakably to “machiya” country, where traditionally timbered, exquisitely restored, homes, restaurants and hotels can be found in the heart of Kyoto’s Gion district.

This particular century-old machiya, once a genteel geisha-totting eatery, is now a bantam-sized luxury hotel. But its survival is in question.

Sowaka and its cedar baths need guests to function. But what can be done? Thanks to a continued closed-door policy to control infections, fearful domestic travellers and a raging “seventh wave” of Covid in Japan, this machiya – a sensitively restored poem to Japanese crafts genius – is bereft of guests for days on end.

Unlike other wealthy countries, since April 2020 Japan, has continuously sealed its borders against individual travellers despite its relatively lower death rates from Covid. Group travel is allowed but such policies are derided as unpopular and unhelpful.

Such strict border controls are approved of by a mainly elderly electorate and citizens who still deliver a stink-eye to those who remove their mask in the street.

But some Japanese fear they may be shooting themselves in the foot. Nor are they blind to the double standards that they themselves are allowed to travel freely outside their country.

“Closing the borders is meaningless,” says tour guide Mr Dai Miyamoto at Localized Kyoto. “Japan now has the highest weekly Covid count worldwide.”

With its previous record 31.9 million international visitors in 2019, Japan was the 11th most-visited country in the world according to Japan’s tourist agency.

Now it hosts just a handful. Staycations, unlike in other regions of the planet, did not take up the slack during the pandemic.

“More than 80 per cent of our profit was from overseas, because Japanese generally like to stay one night, travelling only weekends. So we are mostly empty,” says Mr Yajima peering momentarily over the purling brook, stone lanterns, flora and moss of the hotel courtyard garden. “One more year like this and we are finished.”

Sowaka’s business plan reckoned on foot-loose foreign guests who take longer breaks than the famously presenteeist Japanese, he adds.

Typical of the type of “ryokan” traditional hotel that has charmed locals and foreign visitors for eons, Sowaka comes with the benefit of modern comforts often absent in Japan’s old ryokans, making the place a beacon for inbound travellers.

Fusing the ancient traditions of a Japanese guesthouse with modernity – something of a trend in Japanese hospitality – is even helping preserve Kyotos’s delicate and endangered wooden machiya houses.

But just as the newly minted ryokan thought it time to celebrate its success, Covid-19 erupted leaving the city more woebegone than wabi-sabi.

A host of other new hotels were also blindsided. Hotelier Mr Sumio Takimoto entered the fray four years ago at the height of Japan’s tourist boom, when Kyoto was witnessing a five-fold increase in visitors.

He built a handsome new hotel, Takasegawa Bettei, on the banks of Kyoto’s willowy canal, incorporating traditional flourishes in the “spirit of the machiya” and received a Michelin award for his efforts. But when Japan closed its borders, “business turned deadly,” he says.

Interviewed at his hotel while soundtracked by the entrancing, if lugubrious, “kon-chiki-chin” beat of Kyoto’s Gion festival, he said: “Tourism was Kyoto’s saviour. Less than 10 years ago the economy was in the pits nationwide.”

“Now we are back to dire straits because all industries are on the ropes. It’s the small hotels and the travel and transport that are most exposed. The economy cannot take it.”

Small businesses in Japan have received state handouts during the pandemic and there has been a limited furlough in place. But the economic slide continues. Owing to a domino effect, says Mr Takimoto, the Lexuses have vanished from the once cramped Kyoto streets and the once well-stacked shelves in the shopping malls now look sad and denuded.

With ramshackle charm to burn, Japan’s ancient capital had long been a tourist magnet. They thronged to its world heritage temples, shrines and for a glimpse of geisha amidst the wooden buildings. Badly bruised by the urban blight that scars most Japanese towns, Kyoto retained enough heritage to be the only game worth the tourist candle after Tokyo, despite bulldozing much of its past.