January 28, 2009 | Articles Features Opinions

“Love hotels are a unique Japanese institution – hotels exclusively for sex. Places where husbands and wives who want some privacy go, as well as lovers who can’t keep their hands off of each other, prostitutes and their johns, male prostitutes and their clients, and people who just happen to meet each other and get the urge…”

- (Rod Slemmons and Natsuo Kirino, Love Hotels: The Hidden Fantasy Rooms of Japan, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2007, p.i)

This preceding statement definitively explains the functions of ‘love hotels’ in Japan today. The general perception of such place, that it was been created purely to service bratty children of the rich, or people in concubinary relationships who seek highly secret places to exploit their affairs, is misleading and incorrect. Brothels and bordellos have known for most of recorded history. What makes the love-hotel dramatically different and probably shocking to Westerners is that it is not intended to serve only as a one-night stand for illicit and furtive sexual encounters, but also as a place for married couples to enjoy physical release in privacy and even explore their sexual fantasies. That such an institution even exists, let alone in a highly civilized society, can be an affront to people with commonly held morals.

This paradox – the erosion of the institution of family life in Japan, particularly in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka – emerged from the need for domestic privacy when it came to sexual encounters. Prohibitively high housing prices resulted in forced small accommodations. Many couples live with their parents and children in a small super compact house divided by a light-frame paper wall. These houses may be very close to other houses separated by a thin row-house wall. The euphemistically named ‘love hotels,’ remediate this problem. Couples thus see the love-hotel as an oasis for their relationships – a place where privacy can be purchased. The uniqueness of this Japanese solution is apparent. Judgment must be withheld as to its morality pending solutions from other societies with a similar problem of privacy.

Shibuya, Tokyo: How to Select a Love Hotel Room

The love-hotel: an urban phenomenon?

The Love-hotel could have its genesis only in an urban environment. All the forces that created its necessity and insure its sustainability are present. Since love hotels are usually grouped together just next to the prime business area, it is impossible to discuss love hotels without embracing its connection to the urban realm. Some documentaries and scholars have preliminarily indicated that such sex is no longer taboo, but rather something that is commonplace and supportive to urban life. People might not talk about it, but all kinds of media ranging from manga (Japanese graphic novel), to fashion magazine, to commercial, to adult video, blatantly demonstrate how sex is embraced in the strong cultural context of contemporary society. Love-hotels are open 24/7, able to satisfy the whims of their customers at their convenience. Their service is expedited by the astonishingly fast turnover time of six minutes when gloved and masked attendants prepare the room for the next client. As many as five to six couples can be accommodated each night, and as many as twenty everyday; the resulting business is an extraordinary 4 trillion yen each year. In addition, retail businesses, restaurants, clubs and bars benefit from their proximity to love-hotels from customers who use their services before or after the hotel visits.

Customer anonymity is well protected by virtue of address. The business district’s typical pedestrian-clogged streets add to the effectiveness of the hotels’ location, because individuals are not easily identifiable amidst a crowd. In fact, patronage of the love-hotels actually adds to the crowding of the streets, creating a symbiotic relationship between the love-hotel and the business district. The success of one is directly linked to that of the other, and must be analyzed from the standpoint of the practical needs that sustain the businesses, and the sexual gratification afforded by the love-hotels.

In Shibuya, the jungles of love-hotels are located behind neon billboards which are situated at the rear of the amusement quarter, in the inner part of the commercial areas. Whether a person is there for the purpose of business or for the love-hotel is effectively disguised. The alleys leading to the love-hotel district are quiet during the day. Interestingly, it is just as quiet by night, in spite of the fact that almost all of the rooms are usually booked before dawn.

On approaching the district, one encounters a very quiet street scene of the love-hotel district, quite in contrast to the hotel interiors, which are characteristically hyper-kinetic; that is to say, the love-hotel district processes a very active and dynamic form of urban intervention in a different way. Their clients do not want a replication of their homelike atmosphere; but desire to be free to indulge in sexual activity with guaranteed privacy.

urban morphology and architecture

The urban morphology created by love hotels is interesting: they group into small clusters for absolute spatial efficiency – they share walls, streets, façades, and sometimes entrances – since it is the interiority of the hotels that is important.

It is here that a certain requirement for anonymity creates a contradiction in the architecture. A hotel’s fancy façade must be appropriately attractive, but must also conceal an interior space which is duly characterized by an absence of windows. This allows the interior of the room to be fully decorated according to a fantasy-theme, removed from the world outside.

The architectural structure and mechanism of love-hotels are determined by urban order. There are logical needs for appearance and design that support the operation of the love hotels. If architecture is a physical agent – a building – that accommodates the physical and emotional needs of human in a particular context – then the architecture of love hotels must provide the privacy needed to fulfill emotional desires in a contemporary Japan (beyond an obviously functional role).

However, this privacy is compromised by a lack of security. For instance, anonymity cannot be guaranteed when no identity is needed to enter love hotels – no form of identification is required from customers; one enters, pays, and goes up to a room. Prostitution is illegal, and yet the existence of the hotels plays a contradictory role not only to that of the law, but also to encourage such business. Customers can easily contact their hosts (or hostesses) via the Internet, or meet at secret locations before heading to a ‘no-identity required’ love-hotel.

Exacerbation of a “problem”: An endless cycle

Recent reports by Japanese social scientist show that many schoolgirls in big cities like Tokyo use love hotels as an agency to sell themselves to afford fashionable brand-name items such as handbags. Love hotels in this sense are urban black holes of crime and all manner of mischief that can happen in a small room of enclosed fantasy. This begs the question: How can such dangerous places be accepted and legalized? This practice is made even more attractive by the constant invention of ‘themed rooms’ — the creativity in which hotels’ owners have to come up with to attract their customers together with a special royalty program to keep them coming back. This indulgence in prurience gives rise to sexual experimentation and fantasy and adds to the popularity of sex-hotels.

A society’s need?

The dichotomy between the sex-hotels and Japanese culture is the paradox. Every society has to have an avenue for sexual gratification; no less in this case, where the love hotel-culture has to co-exist with the extreme conservatism of Japanese culture. In the past, this role was taken up by geishas, but the vocation, if you will, has since vanished. In Japan, the people’s sexual lives took a back seat to overwhelming economic ambition, in a rapidly changing, upward social society. Success, with its attendant freer discretionary time and the bombardment of sexually suggestive media have required a unique solution that satisfies sexual needs with minimal harm to Japanese etiquette.

To a degree, this is a reasonable explanation of the existence and constant demand for love hotels. There is, however, another aspect that deepens the need for these love hotels. Many customers indulge in fetishes, which are accommodated by the hotels with rooms decorated to reflect a myriad of surrealist themes which the customers may want. To have such a readily available accommodation for activities that would rightly corrupt the institution of family seems like an unanswerable paradox.

One answer might be that Japanese people are obsessed with sex that is sensationalized by media and hybridized sub-cultures. Another answer is far subtler, that it is a cultural construct that is indigenous to the infrastructure of Japanese society. The latter explanation seems more plausible. One route or the other, we may need to deconstruct the notions of privacy and sexuality in the context of contemporary Japanese society suppressed by the stress and the pressure of business. Brought about by their rapid urbanization during the past three decades, the complexity of contemporary Japanese social structure lies deeply in the mentality of the Japanese, which is too obsessed with ambition to answer these questions in a sociological perspective. A study of the architecture of the love-hotels can offer a clarification because they are not only the physical manifestations of this paradox, but also reflect the institutional and psychological and the effects of urbanism.

I heard about love hotels before I went to Tokyo for the first time in the spring of 2006, without the realization of their enormous role across the spectrum of the society. Today, visiting love hotels is a common practice that is superbly convenient for the working the couple. They are cheap, they do not take much of your time, they don’t need to know who you are, and they are usually right in the center of city where you can come out from your office and go after lunch if you’d like. I would never have thought that sex and the convenience store, or even fast-food service, have this much in common. Customers can rent a room for up to 8 hours (the maximum for efficient customer turnover for love-hotel entrepreneurs) in accordance with the amount of time they want to be in virtual fantasy space that effectively isolates them from the outside world. Once they are in the room, they are in the space of intimacy equipped with the most fanciful things they need to have to help fulfill their desires. No questions asked, no identity revealed.

Shibuya, Tokyo: Love Hotel Hill

It would be felicitous to believe that the sex-hotels exist only to fulfill the fundamental and accepted sexual privileges of marriage which is compromised by the congestion of space. That they also minimize harm to Japanese moral etiquette is also a positive factor. Their existence is based on the Japanese situation, but they can also be condemned as agents that undermine basic moral values. Paradoxically, I would hesitate to blame it all on society; love hotels today are no longer ad-hoc, but institutionalized. They have to exist to service a necessary activity which cannot be sustained in post-war Japan. The congestion of space squeezed the most important activity for a family out of the fundamental equation, affecting also the presumable mentality of the younger generations that they are on their own and they have the right to make the decision when it comes to relationships.

The desire to prohibit and eliminate the love-hotel because of its perceived role in a seemingly deteriorating society is short-sighted. Instead, a more rigorous understanding of their function is needed to understand and come to terms with their existence. The argument is that love-hotels would not exist, and would not be accepted largely by the public in other cultures, due to the impossibility of the adaptation of such service: although they might have gone too far from their original purpose, love-hotels have made possible the preconception that sex is acceptable in the male-dominated social infrastructure in Japan. The hotels are needed as a retrofitting mechanism of an industrialized country unnaturally spawned from economic pressure.

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Non Arkaraprasertkul

Images Courtesy Non Arkaraprasertkul, Vanessa Oguchi, and Travelblog.org

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Non is a doctoral scholar at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford in the UK and Visiting Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design at MIT where he teaches and conducts research on modern architecture, housing/community design, and urbanism of East Asian regions with special focus on China. Trained in History, Theory, Criticism and Urban Design at MIT, Arkaraprasertkul is a Bangkok-based practising architect, urban designer and Adjunct Lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism at Chulalongkorn University. His interests concern issues of contemporary architecture and urbanism, specifically the effects of cultural construction and political economy on built form. Arkaraprasertkul was a Fulbright Scholar in Architectural Studies at MIT from 2005-07, during which time he was also named the recipient of the Rockefeller's Grants, the Asian Cultural Council Research Fellowships, Starr Foundation Fellowships in Cultural Studies, and W.Danfort Compton Memorial Scholarships for Architecture.