The Hotel Seiryu Kyoto Kiyomizu

The Hotel Seiryu Kyoto Kiyomizu opened in 2019 in a building that began its life in 1869 as Kiyomizu Elementary School — one of Kyoto's earliest modern educational institutions, established in the years following the Meiji Restoration when the city's townspeople collectively funded and built their own schools in response to the government's educational reform mandate. The building's concrete and timber construction accumulated layers of character across 150 years before its adaptive conversion into a boutique hotel in the heart of Higashiyama.

The conversion preserved the structural bones and some of the distinctive educational character of the original building — proportions, windows, and circulation spaces that reference the institutional origins without nostalgically restoring them. The result is a hotel with genuine historical depth and a character that is difficult to manufacture in new construction. In Higashiyama's tourist-dense streetscape, it reads as authentically embedded in the district's history in a way that purpose-built hotels cannot claim.

The rooftop bar is the Hotel Seiryu's most distinctive feature: an open-air terrace with views toward Kiyomizudera Temple set on the hillside above. The temple's distinctive wooden stage, cantilevered over the slope, appears in the background of a view that also encompasses the tile roofs and stone lanterns of the approaching lanes. At dusk, with the temple illuminated and the Higashiyama hills turning dark above it, the perspective is among the more quietly spectacular in Kyoto.

Kiyomizudera Temple, the Ninenzaka and Sannenzaka stone-paved paths, and the shops and tea houses of Higashiyama are all accessible on foot. For travelers whose Kyoto is organized around this hillside cultural district, the Hotel Seiryu provides both a base and a viewing platform for one of the city's most intensely scenic environments.