Funaoka Onsen Old Barber Shop

A Small Storefront with a Tall Facade: The Former Barbershop at Funaoka Onsen

Walk east from the Senbon-Kuramaguchi intersection in Kyoto's Murasakino district and you will pass, almost without noticing, a slender two-story building wedged at the corner of a public bathhouse. Its second-floor wall rises straight and flat, plastered in mortar like a Western shopfront; its first floor opens onto an earth-floored interior with tiled wainscoting and an antique counter. This is the former barbershop of Funaoka Onsen, a wooden building of just 29 square meters that has stood at this corner since around 1923. It was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property of Japan on July 1, 2003, together with three other buildings of the Funaoka Onsen complex.

The barbershop never operated as an independent business. It was, from the start, an auxiliary facility of the ryokan and later bathhouse next door — a place where bathers could be shaved or have their hair trimmed after the bath. Today it no longer functions as a barbershop, but the structure has been preserved as part of one of the most extraordinary surviving fragments of Taisho-era Kyoto street culture.

What "Signboard Architecture" Means, and Why This Example Matters

The barbershop is an early example of kanban-kenchiku, a building type that became widespread in Japanese cities during the Taisho and early Showa periods. A traditional wooden frame sits behind a flat front wall finished in mortar, copper sheet, or tile, giving the impression — from the street — of a sturdy Western masonry shop. The flat facade also served as a literal signboard, with room above the eaves for shop names, advertising, or decorative bands.

At Funaoka Onsen, the second-floor wall on the front and side has been raised high in mortar plaster, while the rear and the interior remain entirely Japanese in plan and material. The upper edge of the mortar facade is finished with a band of cornice molding — a small but deliberate flourish that lifts the building above the level of an ordinary shop. Inside, decorative tiles run along the lower walls of the entrance area, the same kind of glazed relief tiles that line the corridors of the bathhouse itself. The Agency for Cultural Affairs cites these tiles and the cornice band as the building's chief design features.

What gives the barbershop its quiet importance is timing. It dates from around 1923, the year of the Great Kanto Earthquake — the disaster that, more than any single event, drove the spread of kanban-kenchiku in cities looking for cheaper, faster, fire-aware alternatives to traditional shop fronts. Surviving examples from this earliest phase, especially outside Tokyo, are now uncommon. The Funaoka barbershop sits in that narrow window.

One Building of Four: The Funaoka Onsen Complex

The barbershop is best understood as part of a set. Four buildings of Funaoka Onsen were registered as Tangible Cultural Properties on the same day in July 2003: the bathhouse (1932, reinforced concrete), the dressing-room hall, the former ryokan building called Funaoka-ro, and this small barbershop. When the registration was announced, Funaoka Onsen became the first operating public bathhouse in Kyoto to receive national designation, and only the third nationwide.

The complex began in 1923 as a high-end ryokan called Funaoka-ro, founded by Ono Matsunosuke, who had previously dealt in garden stones in nearby Kamigamo. His taste for ornament passed down through generations of the family. In 1933 the establishment was rebranded as "Tokushu Funaoka Onsen" — "Special Funaoka Hot Spring" — and the second-generation proprietor, Ono Goichiro, installed what is generally credited as the first electric bath in Japan, having lobbied the relevant ministries with persistence. The business reopened as a regular public bathhouse in 1947 after the difficult war years.

The dressing-room hall next door is the showpiece. Its coffered ceiling of zelkova wood is centered on carvings of a tengu and the young warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune; the transoms around the walls are openwork carvings depicting festival scenes from Kamigamo, Kamo, and Imamiya shrines, as well as a panel commemorating the 1932 Shanghai Incident. Glazed Japanese majolica tiles, modeled on British Victorian tiles and produced for only a few decades in the Taisho and early Showa years, run along the corridor walls. Even today, surviving wa-sei majolica tiles are collected as antiques.

Visiting the Barbershop and the Bathhouse

The barbershop building cannot be entered, but its exterior is fully visible from the street at any hour. Stand on the south side of Kuramaguchi-dori opposite the entrance and you can see the whole composition: the elegant curved gable (karahafu) of the bathhouse to the left, the dressing-room hall in the center, and the tall flat facade of the barbershop to the right. From this angle the architectural mix that defines early-twentieth-century Kyoto townscape — Edo-derived wooden tradition, Meiji-era brick gesture, Taisho Western mannerism — sits in front of you in a single frame.

To experience the interior tilework and woodcarving of the complex, the practical route is to bathe at Funaoka Onsen itself. Admission for adults is 490 yen as of 2025, and the bathhouse opens at 15:00 on weekdays and at 8:00 on Sundays, closing at 23:30; closed on Tuesdays. Photography inside is not permitted past the entrance. Towels and small toiletries are sold at the front desk, so visitors can arrive empty-handed. The men's and women's sides are swapped on alternate days, so two visits offer slightly different views of the same building.

The Neighborhood

Funaoka Onsen sits at the base of Funaokayama, a low hill that the planners of the Heian capital chose as their northern marker. In feng-shui terms the hill is Kyoto's Black Tortoise — the guardian of the north — and a short climb up the slope brings you to Kenkun Shrine, dedicated to Oda Nobunaga. The shrine has become a quiet pilgrimage site for fans of Touken Ranbu, the franchise that gave a young generation of visitors a sudden interest in historic Japanese swords.

A two-minute walk east along Kuramaguchi-dori brings you to Sarasa Nishijin, a café occupying the converted shell of Fujinoyu, a public bathhouse that closed in 1999. The same kind of relief-pattern majolica tiles that line the Funaoka corridors line Sarasa's walls and its central partition — the old divider between the men's and women's sides — making it the natural place to sit after a bath. Farther afield, Daitoku-ji and Murasakino's network of subtemples lie about ten minutes' walk to the north.