Funaoka Onsen Baths

Funaoka Onsen Bathhouse: A 1932 Concrete Bath of Salvaged Stone and Imported Tiles

Step in through the curved cypress gable on Kuramaguchi Street, pass through the dressing room, and at the threshold of the bathing hall an unexpected detail stops most first-time visitors: a stone bridge railing — heavy, civic, obviously not designed for indoor use — running along the corridor inside a public bath. The Funaoka Onsen Bathhouse, registered as a tangible cultural property on July 1, 2003, was built in 1932 as a reinforced concrete replacement for the establishment's original brick bath. The owner's eye for salvage and ornament has kept the building memorable for more than ninety years.

The registered building is the bathing-room volume alone — a single-story reinforced concrete structure of 121 square meters, listed as one building (一棟). It consists of a connecting corridor extending from the dressing room, the men's and women's bathing halls, and a rear space that originally housed the firewood furnace. Above the bathing hall, a raised section of ceiling pierced by round clerestory windows pulls daylight down onto the water. The Agency for Cultural Affairs cites the building's "unconventional design" (奇抜な造形) as the reason for its listing.

From Ryokan Annex to Working Sento

The story begins in 1923, when Ono Matsunosuke, a garden-stone dealer from Kamigamo to the north, opened a culinary inn called Funaoka-rō at the southern foot of Funaoka-yama. The inn's annex bathhouse, built in brick, served customers from the Nishijin textile district who could afford a degree of luxury. That brick bath lasted less than a decade. In 1932 the family demolished it and rebuilt in reinforced concrete — a material at that point closely associated with hospitals, factories, and modernist civic buildings, not neighborhood baths.

The timing was deliberate. The following year, Matsunosuke's son Goichirō installed Japan's first government-approved electric bath, having travelled repeatedly to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to argue his case. He had taken his cue from low-frequency therapy machines used in hospitals. To register the bath under the proper category he renamed the establishment Tokushu Funaoka Onsen — "special" Funaoka hot spring — even though no thermal spring runs beneath the site. The word "onsen" in older Kyoto bathhouse names refers to a style of business, not to geology.

The inn closed during the lean years of the war and immediate postwar period. In 1947 the bathing facilities reopened as a regular public bath, with the surrounding inn buildings repurposed around them. Successive owners kept the 1932 concrete bathing hall intact while modernizing the fittings inside. Four generations on, the Ono family still runs the place as a working sento.

Why It Was Designated

The bathing room was registered on July 1, 2003, under the criterion "a model of design" (造形の規範となっているもの) — one of three possible grounds under which a building can be listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property. At that point only two other operating bathhouses had been listed nationally; Funaoka Onsen was the first in Kyoto Prefecture. The Agency for Cultural Affairs valued the building both as a record of early-Showa public-bath architecture and as evidence of an owner willing to treat a humble building type as a vehicle for ornament.

Three things make the 1932 building distinctive. The choice of reinforced concrete itself was unusual for sento construction at the time. The bridge railing repurposed inside the corridor — salvaged from Kikusui-bashi, demolished that same year at the Senbon-Kuramaguchi intersection to make way for the city tram — is a specific, datable piece of civic Kyoto inserted into a private building. And the dense use of polychrome relief tiles, known as Japanese majolica, treats every surface of the connecting corridor as a decorative field rather than a utilitarian wall.

What to Look For

Before bathing, walk slowly along the corridor between the dressing room and the bathing hall. The walls are sheeted in majolica tile — pressed relief designs glazed in cobalt, ochre, and copper green — produced on Awaji Island and in Aichi Prefecture between roughly 1910 and 1935. Each tile was hand-painted over a molded relief, and the slight irregularities in color and seating become visible when you stop to look at any single panel.

The corridor itself is, in a literal sense, the salvaged Kikusui-bashi. Look out through the window and the stone balustrade continues into the open-air bath garden, where it once spanned a city street. Beneath the corridor windows a small ornamental pond holds koi.

Inside the bathing hall, the most architecturally specific feature is the raised section of ceiling pierced by circular windows — a high clerestory that floods the room with daylight without sacrificing privacy. This single move accounts for much of the hall's airy quality. Toward the rear, the volume that originally housed the firewood furnace (焚場, tateba) survives as a trace of the building's pre-electric era.

The fittings inside the baths themselves are not part of the cultural designation and have been modernized over the years: there are now jet baths, an outdoor pool bordered by Kibune stones that color when wet, a cypress tub, a sauna, and the descendant of Goichirō's original electric bath. Men's and women's sides switch daily, so the architectural details you encounter depend on which entrance you take. A second visit on a different day shows the other half.

The Neighborhood

The bathhouse sits a few minutes' walk from Funaoka-yama, the low wooded hill that rises immediately to the north. Its summit holds Kenkun Shrine, dedicated to Oda Nobunaga, and offers a wide view across Kyoto's grid toward the Higashiyama hills. The hill itself is sometimes identified as the northern guardian of the original Heian capital. To the west, the great Zen monastery of Daitoku-ji and the atmospheric Imamiya Shrine are both within fifteen minutes on foot; Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion, is a further twenty minutes beyond that.

Along Kuramaguchi Street to the east, a former bathhouse called Fujinomori-yu — itself a registered cultural property — has been converted into a café-restaurant known as Sarasa Nishijin. The interior is lined with majolica tiles similar to those at Funaoka, and the original wall dividing men's and women's baths now separates seating areas. Visiting both gives a fuller picture of how prewar Kyoto sento culture looked from the inside.