The Story · since 1954
A Writers' Inn
Returns to Its Beginning.
Est. 1954, Yugashima, Izu
Shirakabe was not built to impress. It was built to hold a particular kind of silence, in the mountain village of Yugashima.
Since its founding in 1954, Shirakabe has stood within the literary tradition of the Amagi valley. Yugashima is the landscape of Inoue Yasushi’s novel Shirobamba, and the territory where Yasunari Kawabata wrote some of his Izu stories. Writers came to Yugashima to work, and to rest.
What the inn has held, across those decades, is a kind of conversation. Manuscripts survive from those years, still kept at the inn. The rooms the writers worked in have not changed much. That, quietly, has been the intention.
The heavy timber doors that meet you in the lobby came from the Gomadō, the fire-ritual hall of Kunōzan Tōshōgū, the National Treasure shrine founded in 1617, in the early Edo period. Four centuries of prayer passed before them. That history now stands quietly in a room kept for rest — and the timber is there to be touched.
Over seventy years the inn has changed, and changed back. The spring water has not been interrupted. The materials of the floor and the walls have not moved far from their origins. What Shirakabe has refused to abandon is the quality of its beginning: a house for a quiet conversation, in a valley that makes quiet easy.
Mingei · folk-craft materials
Material has meaning here. Charred cedar, tatami, hand-thrown pottery. The inn's spirit mirrors the valley's.
This summer two new suites open within that worldview, continuing the conversation the inn has always held.
