Love hotels (ラブホテル)

Young Japanese people usually live with their parents right up to their wedding day, even if they’re pulling in a healthy salary. With small houses and paper-thin walls, such living arrangements are not conductive to good sex. So, where do couples in this island nation of 127 million people go for some nookie?

Love hotels (now a 3 trillion yen industry) – which have been around in one form or another since the 1600s – answer this question. They provide a place for couples (including teacher and student, husband and prostitute) to enjoy some anonymous, uninterrupted and undisturbed time together. Some Westerns may find such enterprises morally offensive (I certainly don’t, however), but in the past few decades that have become a natural part of Japanese urban fabric. Love hotels – or leisure/amusement/boutique hotels (no matter how the name is watered down they still boil down to the same thing) – are found all across Japan in any town bigger than a hamlet. Identifying a love hotel is not so difficult as groups of them tend to cluster near big train stations, in entertainment districts and along major highways. They are usually large, well-lit, strange-looking buildings with a plethora of neon signs. A give away should be the sign displaying the price structure near the front door.

Love Hotel in Tokyo

A pastime of some couples is to go ‘love hotel shopping’, where couples can be seen walking in and out of the lobbies of adjacent hotels seeking out their perfect love nest. You would think that an area full of love hotels would seem to be a seedy environment inhabited by old men with unsavoury women in tow (and in some cases you’d be right) but generally this is not the case. On a Saturday night, many happy couples can be seen, hand-in-hand, dashing in and out of hotels with enjoyable and fun expressions on their faces. They are just normal people who are after some fun, and it’s this that gives areas a fun and rather relaxed atmosphere. Entering into a love hotel’s lobby, you will notice either a board (in cheaper hotels) or a touch-screen (in more expensive hotels) displaying the different rooms on offer, with differing prices depending on the size and amenities etc. If the photo is lit up, the room is available. If you don’t like a room you like, just check out the next establishment.

Chapel Coconuts, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture

When you find a room in a hotel that both takes your fancy and fits your budget, you press the button underneath its photo. Depending on the hotel, you either pay the gender-neutral old lady at a waist-high hole in the wall who then gives you your key or you go to your chosen love hotel room which opens automatically and then either pay using an automatic cash machine or a pneumatic air-chute which connects to the reception. All of this is an attempt to assure anonymity. You pay either for a ‘rest’, usually 3 hours, or for the evening, usually 8-10pm on weeknights and 10pm-12am on Fridays and Saturdays. However, most hotels do not take bookings. As a result, I once had to wait in a love hotel lobby until 10pm when the rooms become available for an overnight stay alongside about ten other couples. We all knew why we were there, no one was embarrassed and the atmosphere was quite fun! I find the obsession with ‘discretion’ rather comical. Some hide customers’ cars behind curtains to conceal their number plates, strategically place walls to make it difficult to see directly into the hotel’s lobby, and have a number of entrances and exits to decrease the chance of being seen by someone. For normal couples wanting to have a good time, I don’t see what they have got to hide.

Chapel Coconuts, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture

While many love hotel rooms may be quite normal – a king-sized bed, a television, en-suite etc in a very ordinary looking building, perhaps distinguished by having small or covered windows, others are quite different a garish in character. Oddly shaped love hotels – UFOs, boats and castles – aren’t uncommon. And that’s just the exterior. The interior is more varied, perhaps in an attempt to help people escape from the regularity of their everyday lives. The elaborate décor can range from semi-normal, to simulated subway and classroom to S&M bondage dungeons and everything in between.

Chapel Coconuts, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka Prefecture

The irony of the price of a night in a hotel is that it is often cheaper than a regular hotel. But regular hotel rooms, unlike their average love hotel counterparts, don’t usually come with plasma TVs, vending machines selling beer and sometimes the latest in vibrator technology, spa baths, games consoles, karaoke, room delivered uniforms of your choice, saunas, and of course complementary condoms. Now that’s what I call service.