Chigasakikan
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| Chigasakikan | |
|---|---|
  Location within Japan | |
| General information | |
| Location | Chigasaki Kanagawa, Japan |
| Coordinates | 35°19′13″N 139°24′03″E / 35.3203901°N 139.400923°E |
| Opening | 1899 |
| Owner | Hiroaki Mori |
| Other information | |
| Number of rooms | 4 |
| Number of restaurants | 1 |
| Parking | 10 |
| Website | |
| www | |
The Chigasakikan (茅ヶ崎館) is a traditional Japanese inn situated in Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. Chigasakikan opened in 1899, and is one of the last remaining seaside ryokan in the Shonan region, which were once abundant. Film directors such as Yasujirō Ozu and Kaneto Shindo were among those who regularly used the area as their holiday home.
Chigasakikan was founded in 1899 by Shinjiro Mori, an engineer from Aichi prefecture.[1]
In 1914, Chigasaki Beach was ranked as the 10th best summer resort in the prefecture by the Yokohama Trade Newspaper. When the celebratory event was held on the beach, Chigasakikan donated the cost of the fireworks.[2][3]
Most of the architecture of the ryokan was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, with the Meiji-era Karakasa ceiling bath the only part of the venue that remained intact. The building was re-constructed in 1925.[4]
In 1937, Yasujirō Ozu stayed at Chigasakikan for the first time.[5] He began staying in Room 2 of the ryokan regularly from 1941, while writing his scripts, using it as his study with Takai Yanai, Tadao Ikeda, and Kogo Noda. Among the scripts Ozu wrote at Chigasakikan were There Was a Father, Record of a Tenement Gentleman, A Hen in the Wind, Late Spring, The Munetaka Sisters, Early Summer, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, Tokyo Story and Early Spring. During his stays, Ozu invited guests to his room and cooked for them. His specialty was "curry sukiyaki" (boiled sukiyaki with curry powder), which remains a speciality dish of the inn. Oil stains from the sukiyaki can still be seen on the ceiling of Room 2.[6][7][8][9] Shozo Ishizaka released a book about Ozu's time at the ryokan in 1996.[10]
Other directors who have used Chigasakikan as their workplace include Kazuyuki Izutsu,[citation needed] Azuma Morisaki,[citation needed] Hirokazu Kore-eda and Miwa Nishikawa.[11][12][13] Kore'eda's Nobody Knows was screened at Chigasakikan in 2013 during the 2nd Chigasaki film festival, shortly after Kore'eda was awarded the Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival for his film Like Father, Like Son.
In 2009, the ryokan's Meiji-era bathhouse and Taisho-era lobby, second floor, and terrace were registered as tangible cultural properties.[14]
In August 2011, the ryokan held a mid-summer "Senbaya" garden party to recover from the shock of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which was visited by more than 1,000 people each day.[15]