Skating history and hotels seem to go hand in hand. Over the years on the blog, we have touched on several hotel shows in the United States, checked into Tokyo's
Sanno Hotel and even looked at
a haunted hotel in Colorado Springs with a skating connection. Well, we're not done yet, skating history lovers!
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Helen Keller in Japan, 1937
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The story of how the Kanaya Hotel in Nikkō', Japan came to be is most certainly a unique one. The Old Tokyo blog tells us, "The hotel began as an inn when the owner, Kanaya Zenichiro, employed as a traditional musician at Toshogu Shrine, offered rooms to foreign travelers who brought with them special letters of introduction. One day in 1871, Kanaya gave Dr. J.C. Hepburn, an American missionary and famous doctor in Yokohama, a night's lodging. Dr. Hepburn then recommended to Kanaya that he open an inn at his house. It was the birth of Kanaya Cottage Inn (also called 'Kanaya Samurai House'). In 1893, Kanaya built a new building in place of the original inn. Among the Kanaya Hotel's most illustrious guests have been British diplomat Ernest Satow, a frequent guest; American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who stayed briefly in 1905; Albert Einstein stayed overnight in 1922; and Helen Keller in 1937."
Bottom photo courtesy "Skating" magazine
Skating has long been a popular pastime for hotel guests. In the fifties, the hotel started freezing its outdoor swimming pool in the winter months and converting it into a skating rink. A second artificial pond, called Lake Placid, had been a popular skating spot since the nineteenth century. "Fodor's Japan And East Asia" guide tells us the first rink at the Kanaya was open both day and night and often packed with both travelers and locals wearing Japanese Geta ice skates which were, according to Kokusai Kankōkyoku, "made from a piece of curved bamboo fastened to the foot by straw thongs".
"Japan Magazine" tells us that as early as 1924 a group of "gentleman and students from Kobe and Osaka" formed the Rokko Skating Club and members came to the Kanaya quite regularly to practice. The caption to a photograph sent to Theresa Weld Blanchard that appeared in "Skating" magazine in 1933 showed a young man performing a sit spin at the club.
By the mid-thirties, when a team of five pioneering Japanese skaters made their debut at the Winter Olympic Games in Germany, Tokyo alone had three indoor rinks. One was in the basement of the Sanno Hotel in Akasaka, another was located at the Isetan Department Store near Sinzyuku Station and the third, a large ice hall run by the Tokyo Shibaura Electric Co., was in Shiba.
Though Japanese skaters are certainly no longer confined to frozen ponds and manmade rinks on frozen baseball fields, you can still retrace the steps and spirals of Japan's earliest skaters today. The Kanaya Hotel is still open, and only a short distance away is the Nikkō Kirifuri Ice Arena.
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