Minshuku - Guesthouse

A lodging facility where private homes offer unused rooms to tourists as a side business. Compared to inns and hotels, they are smaller in scale and the facilities are simpler, but they are characterized by relatively low prices, home cooking using local ingredients, and friendly service provided by family labor. The Inns and Hotels Act, which aims to maintain public health in the inn industry, does not have a concept of a minshuku, and most minshuku are granted a license to operate a "simple lodging facility" which has looser regulations than hotels and inns, and then put up a minshuku sign. Minshuku are often built to cater to specific seasons or purposes, such as swimming in the sea in summer, skiing, mountain climbing, and fishing in winter, or when it is difficult to operate a full-scale lodging facility that operates year-round. Some minshuku have stable management, such as so-called "cuisine minshuku" that sell food, or minshuku that provide convenient use of facilities to meet the demand for student training camps.

It is not clear when minshuku first appeared, but they are said to have appeared in places like Hakuba Village in Nagano Prefecture, Tateyama on the Boso Peninsula, the southern part of the Izu Peninsula, and Takahama on Wakasa Bay between the end of the Taisho period and the beginning of the Showa period. All of these were aimed at securing a source of income other than the primary industry in farming, mountain, and fishing villages, and they rapidly increased in number against the backdrop of the travel boom during the period of high economic growth from the 1960s onwards.

[Nobuyuki Okamoto]

Source: Shogakukan Encyclopedia Nipponica About Encyclopedia Nipponica Information | Legend

民家が副業として部屋の遊休部分を観光旅行者に提供する宿泊施設。旅館やホテルと比べて規模が小さく、施設内容も簡素であるが、比較的低料金で、地場の産物による家庭料理や家族労働による親しみやすいサービスが特色といえる。旅館業の公衆衛生の維持を目的とする旅館業法には民宿の概念がなく、ホテルや旅館よりも規制の緩い「簡易宿所営業」の許可を受けて民宿の看板を掲げる場合が多い。民宿は、夏の海水浴、冬のスキー、登山、釣りなど、特定の季節や目的に対応する場合、あるいは通年営業の本格的な宿泊施設の経営がむずかしい場合などに多い。料理を売り物にしたいわゆる「料理民宿」や、学生の合宿需要に対応して施設利用の便宜を図るなどしている民宿のなかには、経営が安定したものもある。

　民宿がいつ誕生したか定かでないが、大正末期から昭和の初めに長野県白馬村、房総半島の館山(たてやま)、伊豆半島南部、あるいは若狭(わかさ)湾の高浜などで誕生したといわれる。いずれも農山漁村において、第一次産業以外の収入源確保を目的とし、1960年代以降の高度成長期に旅行ブームを背景として急増した。

［岡本伸之］

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