Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Love Hotels

I wanted to research the seedier side of japanese culture and i can across this article on love hotels.

"Sure, Zen gardens, sushi and the Sony Walkman are great, but the greatest Japanese invention of all time has to be the love hotel. In the concrete wasteland of the modern Japanese city, the love hotel stands out as a refreshingly off-the-wall  escape from conformity, a monument to hedonism, and a libertine's paradise.  It's also a godsend when you're tired of taking your girlfriend back to your gaijinapartment with its half-inch plywood walls and nosy neighbours. Nearly every foreigner in Japan has a love hotel story to tell and number of Japanese people who were conceived in one must be enormous. The love hotel is changing though, and the news isn't all good.  They've gone upscale, lost some of their sleazy associations and the decors have become more tasteful but the bad news is that in an effort to clean up their image, they got rid of a lot of the exciting theme rooms.   Although they still exist, its getting harder and harder to find places with bumper cars and disco lights.  A lot of the gaudy designs, ceiling mirrors, and cheesy cupid paintings that made a visit to a love hotel so memorable have also disappeared since Japan has introduced a “New Public Morals Act” intended to regulate love hotels and the sex trade. Hotels which have “facilities not required for the basic purposes of guest lodging” are now categorized as “sex-related businesses” and can only operate in specially designated red light districts such as Shinjuku’s Kabuki-cho or the area of Sapporo.  For hotels in the suburbs, that generally means no more revolving beds, vibrating chairs, or mirrors larger than one square meter.  The hotels have kept up their gaudy facades, but except for the red light districts, the insides are much plainer now.     The “New Public Morals Act” came about in large part because the Japanese government was embarrassed by the amount of foreign media coverage that Japan’s sex trade and child pornography were receiving so they cracked down on both.  Unfortunately, they didn’t realise we liked the love hotels."
Here are some examples of Love hotel Diaries:

posted by Nicole Joydiaries.jpg

1 comment:

  1. Hello Kitty also has a love hotel:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/toestubber/sets/72157594296440276/

    ReplyDelete