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.

Onsen (温泉)

Onsen (hot spring baths) are quite possibly my favourite thing about Japan; they’re up there with sushi and the Shinkansen. They’re a benefit of the country being volcanically active, located at a spaghetti junction of plate-tectonic boundaries. Japan literally has thousands of onsen dotted along its length and breadth due to all of this underground thermal activity. Stand alone onsen houses and ryokan pop up wherever there is geothermically heated oyu (お湯, literally honourable hot water). They come in as many shapes and sizes as the punters. I’ve bathed indoors, outdoors, in a small hut, by the sea in Sakurajima, in view of snow monkeys in Nagano Prefecture, and even in volcanically heated sand in Ibusuki.

Yufuin, Oita Prefecture

Most onsen are mainly found in the countryside, geographically removed from hectic urban life. Such havens of tranquillity are blissfully free of the rules and regulations that make life a minefield of potential social blunders for the average Japanese. This liberation from the structure of polite society is quite possibly what makes taking onsen such a popular pastime. As the warmth of the water penetrates your body, any disappointments and worries are washed away into the mineral-rich water. It’s this mellow atmosphere that I love so much.

Jigokudani, Yudanaka, Nagano Prefecture

One thing must be stressed: you bathe naked! For a gaikokujin (外国人, literally outside person) such as myself, getting naked with total strangers is not exactly the cultural norm. I was rather apprehensive about my first dip in my birthday suit but it soon became quite natural.

Furusato Onsen, Sakurajima, Kagoshima Prefecture

Enjoying onsen is quite simple. Leave your clothes in the dressing room, place a tenugui (手拭い), a modesty towel, over your most private bits and pieces, enter the bathing room, and go and sit down on a wooden or plastic stool next to a shower on the wall. Thoroughly wash your body (making sure not to spray the jet of water emanating from the shower on the person sitting next to you… I’ve been guilty of that a few times) and rinse all the suds from your body. If there’s no shower, use one of the available buckets to ladle hot water over your body, while outside the bath of course. The bath water must not become contaminated with soap or dirty water.

Ibusuki Sand Onsen, Ibusuki, Kagoshima Prefecture

Once thoroughly clean, try to enter the water as gracefully as possible, trying not to create a tidal wave! In the very likely event that the water is too hot, as you ease your body into the water, it’s OK to murmur “atsui” (hot) and pull facial contortions those at the World Gurning Championship would be proud of. Your skin will be tingling all over by now in the hot water. You sit, relax and cook while your worries melt away. At this point, I like to place my folded up tenugui on my head, just because it is what other Japanese too. It’s also rumoured to prevent bathers from passing out after being in the onsen for too long! It’s that easy! I also feel that if you do commit a gaffe against onsen etiquette, bathers are generally in their own little world, too busy trying to de-stress and forget about work to give a monkey’s.