Fuji Rabbit

Fuji Rabbit Building: A 1920s Kyoto Showroom for the Automobile Age

A small ivory-cream building stands on Shichijo Street, eight minutes' walk from the north exit of Kyoto Station. Above its narrow facade rises a curious round tower, behind which a stained-glass arch flickers in the sunlight. Most pedestrians glance up, slow for a moment, then continue on. Few realise that this three-storey corner building, now occupied on the ground floor by a beef-bowl chain restaurant, was once where the people of Kyoto came to buy their first motorcars.

The Fuji Rabbit Building was completed around 1925, in the closing years of the Taisho era, and it carries on its facade a small museum's worth of architectural ideas: classical pilasters with ornamented capitals, a relief panel of a charioteer above the entrance, and stained-glass roundels in which automobile tyres take the place of stars.

The Nikkosha Story: Cars Arrive in Kyoto

The building was raised as the headquarters of Nikkosha, one of Kyoto's earliest automobile distributors. The founder, Kumeda Kojiro, would later go on to establish Yasaka Taxi, still one of the most familiar cab fleets on Kyoto's streets a century later. In the 1920s, when even bicycles outnumbered motorcars on Shichijo Street, Nikkosha imported and sold vehicles including Ford Model Ts. For most Kyotoites, walking past the showroom was their first encounter with the future of urban mobility.

The name "Fuji Rabbit," puzzling to anyone unfamiliar with postwar Japanese transport, comes from a later chapter. After World War II, the building became a sales outlet for the Fuji Rabbit scooter, manufactured from 1947 by Fuji Sangyo, the company that had previously built Nakajima aircraft and which today is known as Subaru. The scooter gave the building its current name, and the name has stuck even after the scooter itself disappeared.

Why It Was Designated

Fuji Rabbit was registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property in the building category on 7 June 1999, under registration number 26-0037. The Agency for Cultural Affairs values it as a rare surviving example of an early-Showa commercial building purpose-built for car sales, and praises the mix of styles compressed into its small frontage: the tower-like rooftop ornament said to symbolise the company name Nikko ("sunlight"), the classical column decorations, and the stained glass on the first floor depicting motor vehicles.

Reinforced concrete commercial architecture from the Taisho period is uncommon in central Kyoto, where most surviving prewar buildings are timber-framed shophouses. Nikkosha's choice of concrete signalled both ambition and confidence in the new industry it served, and the survival of so much original ornament — the leaded glass, the reliefs, the pilasters — gives unusually clear evidence of how a small commercial building of the 1920s tried to look modern, Western, and dignified all at once.

What to Look For Outside

Stand on the south side of Shichijo Street, near the Shinmachi junction, to see the building head-on. Three details reward a slow look.

First, the rooftop tower. It is small, perhaps two metres across, with a flattened dome and arched openings. Local writers have long suggested that its round form is a stylised reading of the kanji for nikko ("sunlight"), which would make it both ornament and signboard.

Second, the stained glass. The largest panel sits in the arched window above the entrance. Inside its leading you can pick out circular forms — at first they look like doughnuts, but they are car wheels, complete with hub and tyre. Smaller leaded panes run along the cornice and over the upper-storey windows. The fact that the new occupant has preserved this glasswork rather than replacing it with plastic signage is one of the quieter pleasures of the building.

Third, the relief above the doorway. A figure in a small chariot, classical in mood, hovers in low relief — an attempt, perhaps, to claim the prestige of antique Mediterranean transport for the automobile age. To either side, slim pilasters carry capitals in a free interpretation of classical orders.

Inside, After the Restoration

The building was carefully restored around 2002 by NEO Architectural Design Office, working from archive photographs to recover original colours and materials. The ground floor is now leased to Naka-u, a national udon and donburi chain. The collision of a 1920s motorcar showroom with a modern fast-food interior is unusual enough to be its own small attraction; whatever you order, you can look up at the stained glass from inside, which is a view not usually granted to passers-by. Upper floors have been used at various times as a salon and a private residence, so visitors should treat anything above the ground floor as off-limits unless an event invites guests inside.

Around the Building

The fifty-metre stretch of Shichijo Street around Shinmachi is densely packed with early-twentieth-century architecture. Diagonally opposite Fuji Rabbit stands the former Konoike Bank Shichijo Branch, another registered cultural property, now housing a restaurant. Walk a few more minutes and you reach Restaurant Kikusui, also nationally registered. The temples Nishi Hongan-ji and Higashi Hongan-ji, both World Heritage candidates in their own right, lie within a five-to-ten-minute walk, as does Kyoto Station's striking modernist concourse by Hara Hiroshi.

Taken together, the area makes for a compact half-day of walking architecture, weaving Edo-era timber halls, Taisho commercial ornament, and twentieth-century steel and glass into a single itinerary.