Bank of Yanagihara Memorial Museum

Bank of Yanigihara Memorial Museum 柳原銀行記念資料館

Overview

Bank of Yanigihara Museum

The Bank of Yanigihara Memorial Museum is a facility much of Kyoto neither knows about nor wants to know about.

The museum is dedicated to and was created by Kyoto's outcaste community: the Burakumin.

In the not so recent past, residents of Buraku - "villages," which were prescribed areas outside of which this caste was prohibited from residing - who formed Kyoto's outcaste population, were not allowed to use any of the city's banks. They could not open accounts, make deposits, send wires, use them for business.

To remedy this, the Bank of Yanagihara was founded in 1899 by nearby residents, in what was one of Kyoto's many Buraku areas.

The bank closed in 1927 because of a depression, and the building was used for other purposes until 1994.

In the 1980s, the city of Kyoto wanted to demolish it to widen nearby Kawaramachi Dori.

However, in 1989, the city declared the building worthy of preservation and had it registered in the list of the cultural properties of Kyoto City in 1995.

Today it is a museum dedicated to the history of the bank and the community that created it.

Much of the second floor features leather workers tools. The Burakumin were forced to do "unclean" work, for example dealing with corpses and animals.

Relevant Routes

The Bank of Yanagihara Memorial Museum is on the Kiyamachi Route. 

Address

6-3 Shimono-cho, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto 600-8206
Tel. 075 371 8220

Hours

10 a.m. - 5 p.m.; closed Sundays

Map

Bank of Yanagihara Memorial Museum Map

If the map does not load when using Internet Explorer (IE) on a Windows PC, please hold down the "Control" key and refresh the page

View Bank of Yanagihara Memorial Museum in a larger map