Kurochiku Co., Ltd. of Kyoto is a company that promotes Kyoto culture through a wide range of business activities, from manufacturing and selling Japanese goods and clothing to managing restaurants and hotels.

Today, we visited Chairman Kurotake at his headquarters.

Their general goods department has an amazing variety of items, and you can find their products at all the major tourist spots in Kyoto, including temples. Today, we had a fun exchange of information, including the possibility of using Shiozawa’s works.

One of these projects is the preservation and inheritance of cultural assets. The company owns a historically valuable townhouse building designated as a tangible cultural property by the city of Kyoto, located a few hundred meters from its head office, and we also visited.

This property first opened as hospital in the late Edo period, and was later built in 1926 Muromachi’s wealthiest merchant, Inoue Toshisuke IV, as a luxurious residence and place for business meetings. Later, during the Show period, it became the property of the Kawasaki family and has been known as the Kawasaki family residence.

The design incorporated the most cutting-edge techniques and fashions of the time, fusing Japanese and Western-style rooms. There were three entrances for quests, the owner, and servants, which shows the high social status of the owner at the time. From the corridor, you can see the beautiful garden through glass windows over 1m wide, which are impossible to manufacture today.

In Kyoto, historic buildings like this one after another are being demolished and replaced with buildings and hotels.

This mansion was also reported in 2019 to be demolished by its new owner, a Tokyo real estate company. Therefore, Chairman Kurotake bought and protected it from 2022.

It’s a great decision.