Honeymoons are the one time in a married couples’ life where it’s expected that they go kuh-ray-zee with each other. Many honeymooners book nights at expensive hotel suites and spend their hours basking in their new love. After that, well whoop de doo? No more adventurous romping, no more expensive suites designed to inflame passions, no more time committed to getting reacquainted with each others’ charms except perhaps once a year on Valentine’s Day. Boorrrrinnng. The daily grind of work, kids, family, chores, etc. can wear a couple down and leave no room for luv’n. I call this “Marriage Cut Off Syndromeâ€.
The Japanese are no different and are in fact worse off with MCOS than couples here in America. Most Japanese families live together as a group (Granny, Gramps, Auntie Yuki, Uncle Wantabe, Cousin Ayaka; you get the picture). Japanese offspring usually live with their parents until they’re married off, adding additional bodies to the equation. Think of all these people squeezed together in a tiny house or apartment with only paper-thin walls or actual paper providing the privacy and one can realize that there really isn’t much privacy at all.
The Japanese seem to have a cure for this or at least a cure for not getting caught while getting nooky; Love Hotels. These hotels have designed every room like a honeymoon suite. Each one is usually outfitted with a bed, big screen TV, karaoke machine, video game console, and fridge. Aside from these standards, most love hotels offer themed rooms for her/ his pleasure. These themed rooms are the ones that really attract the customers.
Every major city has a district where the bulk of the love hotels are located. Most of these love hotels are situated there since they fall under the category of “sex trade†due to the themed rooms. Anything that isn’t considered wholesome fun by the “New Public Morals Act†(why isn’t a Hello Kitty S&M room considered wholesome fun people?) gets filed under sex trade and most operate inside a city’s red light district. The things which are the main draw to kinky or curious couples are also considered the dirtiest by the government and hence bulked together under this label.
Back to themed rooms since this, to me, is absolutely fascinating. Many rooms have a main theme that help folks live out specific fantasies or to add a little more wasabi to things. For example:
- Outer space
- Under the sea
- Bumper Cars (Sounds like fun)
- Gone With the Wind
- Naughty nurse/ Dirty doctor
- Prison love
- Anne of Green Gables
- French Provence
- Pirates
- The 70’s (why??)
- Popular cartoon characters (Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Hello Kitty to name a few)
- Traditional Japanese rooms (for those who want that “realistic†Japanese flavor they can’t recreate at home…)
and many, many, many others.
S&M room are by far the hotels’ most popular attractions. Hotels have incorporated bondage gear into most theme rooms or have straight up bondage rooms specifically used by naughty boys and girls to hone their lashing abilities.
Love hotels also have splashy, colorful exteriors to match their wacky interiors. Hotel Loire in Osaka has gaudy colors and ribbons painted on its facades proclaiming to one and all its function as love hotel. Other hotels are just as loud but some are demur in appearance and offer less titillating fare to their customers.
For every taste, kinky or common, there’s a love hotel suited to it. The one thing all couples who patronize these dens of desire hunger for is privacy and anonymity. This is provided for by the underground parking garages and lack of face to face staff when checking into a room. Customers can slip unseen into a love hotel and reserve a room all by using automated systems. One system that’s popular is the one by which lovers are offered a screen lighting up available rooms. Once a room is chosen, the selected room goes dark and lights in the hallway guide the way to the room.
There are three ways to spend some time in a love hotel:
1.)“Restâ€- meaning about an hour or three and the price is any where from 2500 to 45000 yen hourly
2.)“Service Time†or “Free Timeâ€- These are the times during the day when the rates are the cheapest.
3.)“Overnight Stayâ€- you guessed it; it’s all night but check in is at 9:00 or 10:00 and check out is 10:00 the following morning.
“You get what you pay for†is definitely in play when going to a love hotel. If you want a quality atmosphere for quality luv’n you’re gonna need to spend some quality cash. Love hotel prices run the gamut from 50,000 yen per night to 115,000 yen per night. Depending on what you’re using the room for, 50,000 a night is pretty cheap, especially if you’re using it as a place to crash if you’re touring Japan.
Love hotels tend to lend a blind eye to their customers’ intent. Love hotels can be a good resource to those who plan on touring Japan on a budget. Each hotel has different policies so don’t count on every love hotel being as friendly to tired foreigners as a previous one.
Love Hotels have become increasing popular in Japan over the years and many young couples find their way to one at least once in their lives. I still haven’t seen love hotels used in anime, but given time and their rising popularity it’s inevitable that they’ll make an appearance. Who knows, with meido cafés on the rise and moe becoming a staple in anime series, is a meido or moe themed love hotels too far behind?
I think the closest thing that we Americans have to the Japanese love hotels is Las Vegas. Not necessarily the same but similar.
The Japanese have just a better business model for this type of thing.
wow this is really informative…i didn’t know so much info about this topic until now.
i saw a love hotel in the onegai teacher ova! i was like w0ah do they really exist? and yes they do b/c you just confirmed it o_o It’s diff in America b/c we don’t have paper thin walls. we have privacy…most of the time >_>
Apparently, there is a place called Tubs in Seattle. Go to the blog at the end of this link. Then do a search with the term “Love Hotel” and make the search for “thezeroboss” and not the web. I didn’t include the full link as some may find the title a bit unpleasant.
http://thezeroboss.com/
For those with less cash, there’s always those roadside motels…they’re (hopefully) clean, have color TV and air conditioning…
http://www.roadsidepeek.com/motels/index.htm
Great information. By the way, there’s a love hotel featured in the Love Hina Christmas Special. And though I’ve never read a shoujo manga where the characters visit a crazy love hotel, there are plenty of references to going to hotels for reasons other than sleeping (but that’s no different than the U.S. certainly).
Waa I so wanted to stay in a love hotel while we were in Japan. Now you have enthused it seems like an even more fun ida. That first pic looked like a bedroom I wouldn’t have minded when I was 7! lol
Ah yes and I seem to remember a great love hotel scene in Joshikousei when the really innocent and childish onegets taken to one by a random man – hijinks ensue.
You’re joking, I thought these only exisited in anime and manga o___o
@scottfrye, who wants to travel to Vegas for some fancy nooky (-^)? I want to be able to go down by the St. Louis Landings and find a slew of these beauts. And yes, the Japanese do have a better business model because they’ve been doing it for some 40 odd years o_0
@ jinyamato, yes …now you know, and knowings half the battle…yo Joe!
@ thegreencrayon, even if modern day structures in Japan permitted more privacy, I still believe that love hotels would be popular. And while we have NO privacy to speak of now (we usually have plenty) I’d still like to go to one of these.
@mochi, Tubs sounds…interesting, but I’m more interested in the themed rooms than the hourly rate. I could probably swing by Washington Park to get hooked up hourly. I want to see the Hello Kitty swingers room. Or the Carousel Room. Or the Mad Scientist Room. Or, well, you get the picture.
@ Senna, Love Hina featured a Love Hotel? Crazy. In all the anime I’ve watched, I’ve not once seen a love hotel or heard a love hotel reference. Maybe I’m not watching the right anime.
@love, the first pic is something David wouldn’t mind now lol, (he’s such a pirate lover). More love hotel references in anime! I had no idea.
@Lenners, no honest to goodness it’s real. When I first heard about ‘em, I was like, meh, sounds like downtown. But then, I didn’t know about the themed rooms….
Love Hotels factor into a lot of modern Japanese films. Hanging Garden had one, Visitor Q opens in one. Love and Pop has quite a few scenes. While not technically a love hotel, there are elements found in Party 7. Yah.
Actually, a budget love hotel is a good place for holidayers with tight purse strings. In most cities, love hotels are quite common just not on the incredible detail and scale of the Japanese ones. Respect!
And the vending machine system that prevents embarrassment… great idea too.
Here in Singapore, like in most countries, there’s quite a bit stigma about actually going to a real hotel. It just sounds kinky.. so people have sex at stairwells and outdoor parks. Ugh.
Because in America people just fuck in their bedrooms?
Love hotels are pretty entertaining though. I like how they’re all designed to look like castles or famous world landmarks. Leading to the joke in Abenobashi where they see an actual castle and the girl is like, “L…LOVE HOTEL?!”
They have them in America. http://www.saltlakecity.com/anniversary-inn/
@tj han
“…so people have sex at stairwells and outdoor parks.”
Oddly enough, up through the occupation period (Post-WWII), it seems that many if not most Japanese used (not the stairwells) the great outdoors. The following quote came from a document I found from the University of Michigan Law School archives…I’ll provide the link to it later in this comment:
“So if machiai and noodle shops were mostly used by pros, where did the other “amateur†(non-monetary) couples go? The available evidence points to one primary location: outside. As Shoichi Inoue explains in his thorough history of Japanese ‘love space,’ ‘At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, many couples made love outside. In fact, the general movement of male/female interaction form outdoors to indoors is said to be an extremely recent development.’ Even as late as 1973, novelist Aiko Goto, in an interview regarding a recent increase in the number of love hotels, responded:
‘Sex was originally something to be done while bathed in sunlight in the middle of a field. The need to seek simulation behind closed doors shows how weak people have become. Young people don’t need stimulation like that; young people should be doing it in the park. It’s much more pleasant.’
And do it in the park young people apparently did. A 1916 news report notes that park benches and fields were full of amateurs in the evenings, including ‘doctors and nurses, office workers and female assistants, manual laborers, cooks, and their girlfriends, reporters and their contacts, bank workers and female apprentices’ The practice continued well into the U.S.Occupation, when ‘as the sun set, lovers gathered in places like the Imperial Palace grounds and Inokashira Park, and the next morning the grass was full of paper scraps and condoms.”
So perhaps the Japanese once had similar views as those currently held in Singapore.
@ Rachel
Actually I had abbreviated my first post quite a bit due to the sudden arrival of a special project at work which had to edited ASAP. Therefore, I kept the post limited to the rough equivalent of a US Love Hotel and some humor (sort of) with respect to the roadside motel.
Being from the US, I was totally unaware of the Love Hotel. My wife, who is Japanese, told me about them a couple of years after we got married. However, she was raised at a time when Love Hotels were viewed quite dimly by most of the general populace. The themed architecture and rooms were the exception rather than the rule…the Meguro Emporer hotel had not yet been built. So what she told me was rather negative and reminded me about the sleazy hotels and roadside motels portrayed in various movies and novels. Imagine my surprise when I start seeing stories on CNN and other sources about the Love Hotels in Japan with their themed rooms. I pointed this out to my wife who was amused, but I’m afraid she still has negative views about them…I guess we won’t be staying at one in the near future the next time we visit Japan.
Anyway, I got curious and did a little research. It seems that the development of the Love Hotel was rather haphazard. By the 1970s, there were elite hotels like the Meguro Emporer as well as small mom and pop operations. They were also spread out. They did not necessarily stay in the red light districts and they could even be next to schools and retirement
homes. In 1978, a supermarket owner tried to build a Love Hotel close to a junior high school and the subsequent legal battle eventually lead to the 1985 Revisions to the Entertainment Law. This was meant to help regulate Love Hotels…interestingly enough, it provided the catalyst for the growth and development of what we now know as the Love Hotel.
I found this 2002 document from the University of Michigan Law School archives. It goes into more detail about what I just mentioned. I gave tjhan an excerpt…which you can read above. I found the document interesting and there really is not much “legal-ese” at all…mostly in the form of footnotes:
http://www.law.umich.edu/CentersAndPrograms/olin/abstracts/discussionpapers/2002/West 2002-018.pdf
That should be “Meguro Emporer” hotel…I don’t know why it replaced the
first “o” with a “p”.
Oops…misspelled Emperor that time…oh well…
I must be losing brain cells at an accelerated rate. I also forgot to mention
some Love Hotel mentions:
Since I like to read reviews before viewing older anime, I ran across this
article from the Anime News Network about Ichi The Killer, Episode 00:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/ichi-the-killer-episode-0/dvd
Apparently this was a prequel to the live action movie. I wasn’t interested in
watching it as I am not particularly interested in a story about the making of
a killer. However, it seems there is a scene which makes reference to a Love
Hotel…I don’t know if they actually show the characters at the hotel.
In Aa! Megami-sama TV, episode 7 there is a scene where Toshiyuki Aoshima
takes Belldandy to a Love Hotel and tries to take advantage of her. Needless
to say, it’s not a good idea to try this with a goddess. In the anime, there is
nothing which actually identifies the hotel as a Love Hotel…in the manga,
chapter 20 (I believe), the same scene makes direct reference to a Love
Hotel.
Two other anime series which did not mention Love Hotels, but the manga did:
Karin (aka Chibi Vampire…for some strange reason) had Kenta’s mother
working at a Love Hotel.
Midori no Hibi had a scene in a Love Hotel room complete with a spinning
disco ball and vibrating/bouncing bed.
*sigh* I knew they existed (I have seen them in anime, Excel Saga, I think Love Hina at some point, etc.), but man.. now I REALLY wanna GO!
Do they really have bondage/chains incorporated on the walls or something? ^__^
@Kurisutei, yes they really have the whole bondage dealie in some of the rooms. I’ve seen bondage gear even in non-themed rooms incorporated into the wall or doorways. Don’t these hotels look like so much fun? Hehehehe, when I go, I know where I’m staying…
The best “Love Hotel” I have heard of and been to is called Mon-Chalet and is in Denver.
They have mirrors all around the bed, mood lighting bubble light panels, free adult movie channels,
sex swings and all kinds of other kinky stuff. The website to check it out is http://www.mon-chalet.com
I would highly recommend going if you get the chance. It is way more fun and better looking in
person than in the pictures. It is a very clean place everytime I have been there. No stains or
anything.