Japanese in Search of Love Hotels

JAPAN, LOVE WILL FIND A WAY

Payback

 Love Hotel

Words and pictures by Ampontan

http://ampontan.wordpress.com/2007/05/27/in-japan-love-will-find-a-way/

 Love Bath

If you’re out on the town by yourself on a Friday night in the West and encounter the girl/guy of your dreams (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), the question at the end of the night often becomes, “Your place or mine”. If one or both of you are married or otherwise engaged, it then becomes a matter of finding the closest Holiday Inn or motel (or so people tell me).

Those solutions are not an option for most Japanese, however, as many Japanese young people, particularly women, still live at home. Japan also doesn’t have the interstate highway system of the United States, and people are more likely to take a train or airplane for longer trips, so the motel industry is nonexistent.

Love Lounge

Love will find a way, however, and in Japan that way is usually in a “love hotel”. Since the urge is eternal, the Japanese have no problem with recognizing and calling a spade a spade, so there are plenty of businesspeople looking out for the main chance. That’s why love hotels are a major industry in Japan and are found everywhere—including sedate suburban neighborhoods. I live in a quiet, older part of town, and three blocks away from my house is an establishment with a small neon sign in front announcing itself as the Hanazono (Flower Garden). Discreet as it is—the entrance and exits are hidden—everyone knows exactly what it is, and no one seems to mind. The initials NIMBY (not in my back yard), often used in the U.S. when people do not want certain facilities or enterprises in their neighborhood, don’t seem to apply here. They’re in everyone’s backyard.

They’ve been there for a long time, too. Love hotels offer rates for stays of two hours or less, or for all night, and short-stay hotels for couples have existed in Japan since the early 1600s. The forerunner of the modern love hotel was called a tsurekomi ryokan. Ryokan are Japanese style inns and tsurekomi means bring your own, and they’re not talking about bottles. These facilities were mandated by the government for the use of Occupation servicemen after WWII, when prostitution was still legal in Japan. After prostitution was outlawed in 1957, the hotels spread out, grew, and transformed into a different kind of lodging entirely.

The original tsurekomi ryokan had little or nothing in the way of amenities, including toilets or air conditioners. They were for servicemen and hookers, after all. But to stay in business after the Occupation forces left, the operators developed the modern love hotel that became a financially lucrative industry. How lucrative? Try four trillion yen a year. Statistically, there are 951 couples in a love hotel somewhere in Japan this very minute. The hotels have an occupancy rate of 260%, compared to 70% for the normal hotel. Rates are so reasonable that a room can be rented for the night at a price lower than that of a standard hotel, and there is no falloff in amenities. In fact, some tourist guides suggest that travelers to Japan looking for inexpensive accommodation consider staying in love hotels.

It goes without saying that they are discreet. The entrances and exits are hidden. Customers park in a lot that is often underground, and there are devices resembling traffic barriers or other means to hide license plate numbers from the nosy or the cameras of private detectives. There is no front desk and no cheerful staff member to greet you (or recognize you in town during the day two weeks later). Modern hotels allow customers to select a room, find it, and pay for it through a completely automated system. In the old-fashioned places, couples inform the staff by in-house telephone when they’re going to leave, and the cash is anonymously collected through a slot in the door.

Due to the number of hotels and the intense competition, hotels are often decorated using specific themes to attract visitors. Some try to capture the romance of Europe. The room in the accompanying photo tries to create the mood of Greece with its view of the Acropolis. Doing the research for this article, I saw a photograph of one hotel that offered rooms with the ambiance of a “European port”. Not the area close to the docks, I hope. Some feature amenities not usually seen in the home, such as a rotating bed or a ceiling mirror. Others duplicate the sets of movies popular in Japan, such as Roman Holiday or Gone With the Wind.

Believe it or not, the primary customers for love hotels are women in their 20s, so the hotels are designed and decorated with female customers in mind. The highest outlay by owners for an individual room is the bath, which of course has a Japanese style tub. They’re stocked with brand name shampoos, hair conditioners, and other beauty products to attract repeat customers. The nearby photo on the left shows a sink that the hotel says upfront was designed to appeal to women, while the one on the right shows the expense hoteliers will go to for the bath.

Two-Way TV

And they offer more than décor. Hotels often provide free drinks in the refrigerator and free dinner or breakfast, while others have chefs on the staff to provide free food. Then there are the bonuses. One hotel offered a free trip to Tokyo Disneyland to any couple who stayed in all 24 rooms of their rooms within six months and a free trip to Hong Kong for those that did it twice

The amenities offered by hotels even differ by region. In the Kansai area (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe), the love hotels tend to use free food to attract customers, while those in the Kanto area (Tokyo, Yokohama) emphasize rooms that create a specific mood or atmosphere.

If you’re thinking that the Japanese are a nation full of rabbits, however, consider these statistics. Japan usually ranks last in sexuality surveys for frequency of sex. They average 36 times a year, compared to 97 times annually worldwide. When asked what activities they prefer to sex, 20% of Japanese said sleeping and 13% said shopping. They do have a higher ranking for number of partners per person, however. Their average is 10.2, placing them seventh and above the world average of 7.7.

If you ever find yourself in Japan and want to find a love hotel on the net, there are plenty of nationwide directories, including one here and another here. If you can’t have a good time in some of these places, check into a monastery instead!