Mampei Hotel Alps Wing

A 1936 Hotel Building That Never Stopped Taking Guests

Mampei Hotel Alps-kan (万平ホテルアルプス館, the Alps Wing) is the main building of the Mampei Hotel in Sakura-no-sawa, Karuizawa, Kitasaku District, Nagano Prefecture. Completed in 1936 as a three-storey timber structure, it was entered on Japan's national register of Tangible Cultural Properties (Buildings) on 2 November 2018 under registration number 20-0538.

The building opened to guests on 1 July 1936. It has been in more or less continuous hotel use ever since, with two significant interruptions: requisition by the United States Eighth Army after 1945, and a full closure between January 2023 and 2024 for the largest renovation in its history. Ninety years on, the room numbers have changed, the plumbing certainly has, and the front elevation has not.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records a floor area of 1,282 square metres and metal-sheet roofing, with a documented remodelling in 1973. The registration criterion cited is that the building is a model of design, the category applied to architecture judged exemplary rather than merely old.

Kume Gonkurō's Two-Sided Building

The architect was Kume Gonkurō (1895–1965), whose other work includes the Nikkō Kanaya Hotel and the Fuji View Hotel. He had studied in Germany and developed a system of earthquake-resistant timber framing that carries his name, and the Alps Wing is built on it. The contractor was Inoue-gumi.

Look at the front and two design vocabularies are running at once. The facade sets a pair of steep gabled roofs side by side, presenting their gable ends to the approach, and part of the upper storey is pushed forward on projecting purlins in the manner of a medieval European townhouse. The dark timbering against pale render reads, to most visitors, as Alpine half-timber. That was the intention: this is a mountain resort hotel, and it wanted to look like one.

Then the details start arguing. The Agency's commentary notes elements drawn from honmune-zukuri, the vernacular farmhouse type of the Shinshū region, worked into key positions on the building. A visitor from Zurich sees Switzerland. A visitor from Matsumoto sees a farmhouse roof. Both are looking at the same joinery.

How the building got here

The hotel traces its origin to 1764, when an inn called Kameya opened on the Nakasendō highway at Karuizawa. In 1886 the Canadian Anglican missionary Alexander Croft Shaw and the Imperial University teacher James Main Dixon spent a summer there, and the word they carried back to Tokyo helped turn a declining post town into a hill station. Kameya became the Kameya Hotel in 1894, the year the Mampei counts as its founding, and adopted the spelling MAMPEI two years later because foreign guests could pronounce it.

The move to the present site at Sakura-no-sawa came in 1902. The Western-style building put up then was demolished in the mid-1930s, and the Alps Wing replaced it. That same year the hotel settled on the character form it still uses.

Later history left its own deposits. Tanaka Kakuei met Henry Kissinger on the property in 1972. John Lennon brought his family to the Alps Wing for three consecutive summers from 1977. The building was listed among Japan's Modernisation Industrial Heritage sites by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2007, eleven years before its cultural property registration.

What You Can Actually See, and When

This is a working hotel rather than a museum, which changes the terms of a visit. Guest floors are for guests. The ground floor of the Alps Wing, however, holds the lobby and the shop, and the hotel's restaurants and café are open to people who are not staying. Arriving for afternoon tea is the simplest way to get inside the registered building without booking a room.

In the lobby, take the staircase beside the front desk. Set into the wall above it is a stained-glass panel showing a tortoise, a reference to the Kameya inn from which the hotel descends, and on a bright afternoon it throws colour down the treads. The shop on the same floor opens 8:00 to 20:00 and sells the hotel's fruit cake, apple pie and jams. Indoor photography is generally tolerated in public areas, though it is worth asking staff before pointing a camera at anything, and other guests' privacy comes first.

The ninetieth-anniversary year

Because the Alps Wing opened on 1 July 1936, the hotel is running an anniversary programme from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. The Main Dining Room has an anniversary dinner course at 32,200 yen. The Café Terrace offers an anniversary parfait at 3,220 yen, layered with fruit jelly styled after stained glass and topped with a chocolate lily-of-the-valley, alongside a scone set at 2,760 yen served with rhubarb, pumpkin and orange jams reconstructed from early Shōwa Karuizawa recipes. The bar pours an Alps Lemonade at 2,530 yen, a red cocktail built on the lemonade that writers are said to have drunk here in the 1930s. Items are updated through the year, so check the hotel's announcements before travelling.

The Mampei belongs to the Japan Classic Hotel Association, a group of nine pre-war hotels still operating as hotels and holding cultural property status. If you are working through that list, this is one of the more accessible entries.

Getting there

Karuizawa Station is about seventy minutes from Tokyo on the Hokuriku Shinkansen and about thirty minutes from Nagano. The hotel is roughly two kilometres from the station, five minutes by taxi. Guests with reservations can use a free shuttle between the hotel and the south exit of Karuizawa Station, which must itself be booked in advance. By car, allow about twenty minutes from the Usui-Karuizawa interchange. Note that parking for overnight guests became chargeable on 17 August 2026, so confirm current arrangements when you book.

The old Karuizawa Ginza shopping street is a ten-minute walk. The Shaw Memorial Chapel, built in 1895 and named for the missionary who stayed at Kameya, is about fourteen minutes on foot, which makes for a neat piece of circular history.