Supporting this are 30,000 love hotels nationwide providing places for the 500
million visits that take place each year. Some 1,370,000 couples use a love
hotel daily (1 percent of the total population of 127 million people on any
given day), and one research project has calculated that half of all sex in
Japan takes place in a love hotel, and that consequently a large part of the
country's offspring is conceived in one.
This is because a large percentage of the patrons are married to each other. It
has been estimated that customers fall into three categories: married, just
dating, and adulterous. Their demands, however, are all the same - couples
(married to each other or not) seeking space dedicated to sexual intimacy on a
short-term basis, away from their crowded, nosy homes.
Other countries have their love-hotel equivalents - South Korea, Singapore, the
Philippines - but these are not often of the same caliber as Japan's. Here the
love-hotel establishment is not only geared to provide security and quiet, but
also to create an atmosphere that is romantic (even fantastic), as
other-worldly as Disneyland but at the same time stuffed with various handy
gadgets.
Love-hotel excesses are well known, though now less evident since the 1985
revision to the Law Regulating Businesses Affecting Public Morals. This put an
end to the large mirrors and big, round dendo (electric) beds that moved of
their own accord. The contemporary love hotel is now much more kawaii (cute)
than kinky.
Among the the reasons offered for this is that there has been something of a
power shift in love-hotel choice. It used to be the male half that decided.
Back then the places had hopeful macho monikers - Empire, Rex, King. Then the
female half began to choose. Love hotels started calling themselves "fashion
hotels" or "boutique hotels," and began to have lavish lobbies with
theme-shops, colors like beige and lavender, and decor like Laura Ashley.
This change can be documented in the Meguro Emperor (still in Meguro), which
began in 1973 as a he-man fort before it slowly metamorphosed into a romantic
Disneyland castle. The interior has been several times revised to segue from
male- to female-friendly. Even the name has changed. It is now Gallery Hotel.
In most love hotels "macho" kanji has been replaced by "feminine" hiragana,
trendy katakana or, more often, romaji, that romanized script that carries no
male/female associations at all.
The fashion hotel has grown ultra discrete (no one sees you once you are
inside; in fashion motels, your license plates are hidden and there are no
windows) and the erotic becomes the exotic, the risky becomes riskless, and the
bed is seen as more trophy than taboo.
In her learned and entertaining book on the anthropology of the love hotel
Sarah Chaplin follows the ups and downs of her subject and is particularly good
in connecting its changes with those within the larger public. From the hovels
of the late 1950s, almost entirely associated with adultery and prostitution,
we have proceeded to the present pleasure palaces of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and
almost everywhere else.
The entrances of such places used to resemble those of public toilets (a
bafflement that allowed entry but discouraged voyeurism, and which one critic
called "a purely pragmatic answer to a basic physical need.") Not now. Privacy
otherwise ensured, we scan the modish room-menu, take a look around the shop
and note the brand-name goods for sale, and then proceed to a bedroom in all
ways more lavish than our own.
Since Chaplin is an academic, a number of authorities are evoked and
acknowledged, but her style remains lively and readable. Remarking on the
dispatch necessary of those cleaning the room and changing the sheets in the
five minutes after an occupancy, she quotes that one might liken the process to
a pit crew of a Formula One racing team's.
Here then is everything you would want to know about one of Japan's most significant architectural achievements, one which is also certainly its most lucrative.
