Uncover the secrets of the special "love hotel" created by Japan

The Japanese have always been a controversial nation, and their national culture and Bushido spirit have always been used as a tool for preaching. "Love hotel" is a special culture in Japan. Although the Japanese have given love hotels countless nicknames to cover up their identities: abbreviated as LoveHo, boutique hotel, couple's hotel, fashion hotel, theme hotel... but in fact, you can still find those theme love hotels that are becoming increasingly rare. Only by experiencing sex in those windowless rooms that look like theme parks can you feel the love of the Japanese.

If you can still find those dwindling number of themed love hotels, you will understand that a true Japanese love hotel is not an apartment-style room that provides business hotel-like services (unfortunately this is the most common love hotel used by Japanese people nowadays). Only in those windowless rooms that look like theme parks can you feel the love of the Japanese.

All your curiosity about the guests of Japanese love hotels can be answered at 10:30 on Sunday morning. You may see a middle-aged couple traveling by car quietly park their car in the parking lot, then run a few meters with half-covered faces to get into the hotel door, and then the waiter quickly covers their license plate number with a color plate; a young couple walks into the door of the love hotel arm in arm with a relaxed step, as if entering a McDonald's restaurant; and finally, perhaps very dramatically, a foreign woman drags her luggage into the hotel door with a sense of relief, but walks out awkwardly with her luggage a few minutes later... In the nearly 30,000 love hotels in Japan, these are just scenes that are played out every minute, and every couple who walks out of the love hotel can look like a passerby at the moment they step out of the door.

In Western society, if a couple wants to secretly book a room in a hotel, they usually use a fake name like "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", but in Japan, love hotels are confusing passers-by with the names of boutique hotels, love hotels, theme hotels and fashion hotels.

Objectively speaking, Japan is not a holy land of love. A population of 127 million people live on an island the size of California. Newlyweds who live with their family elders after marriage rarely have a suitable space to express their needs at any time. Even for single young people who make a living in big cities, the plywood partitions of traditional rooms are not very soundproof; the high hotel prices make them discouraged... All of this provides excellent conditions for the development of love hotels, making the existence of love hotels in this country as normal as McDonald's.

The biggest feature of Japanese love hotels is privacy, which is related to the character of Oriental people. Who would announce that they are going to enjoy themselves? In many love hotels, the contact between guests and waiters is reduced to a minimum. They choose the room and get the key to enter through a vending machine-like screen without anyone knowing. They will not come face to face with other people until the final checkout and payment.

Although many Japanese people have been to love hotels, it is very difficult to get a Japanese person you meet for the first time to tell you which love hotels she has been to. When Miss Matsuyama met me for the third time, she excitedly took out a love hotel points card from her wallet. Just like when you drink coffee at Starbucks, you get a stamp. There were obviously 9 blue stamps on the 20 spaces on it.

If one carefully counts the love hotels she has visited, the total number is no less than 200, which is a considerable number in her 27-year-old life, not to mention that she also studied abroad for 4 years. "What I value are the hotel's toiletries, whether the environment is clean, and whether there are toys available." For Matsuyama, love hotels are a must-have in Tokyo life. The love hotels she is most familiar with are one near her home and the other near her boyfriend's home. "I think convenience is the most important thing for love hotels." Of course, among her 9 stamps, she did not go there entirely with her boyfriend. More and more love hotels provide modern entertainment services such as PSP and karaoke. Therefore, for the increasingly competitive market, this place has also become an entertainment venue for same-sex friends to while away the time.

"Japan is not a 'partnership' country," Matsuyama said. "After getting off work late at night, we don't go out to eat or go home with our boyfriends or girlfriends. Instead, we go out for drinks with same-sex friends and colleagues. Boyfriends and girlfriends usually meet only once or twice a month." This lifestyle has caused Japan, which has a developed erotic culture, to rank last in the world in terms of sex satisfaction. According to a 2005 DUREX survey, among the developed countries in the world, Japanese have the least sex after marriage, while researchers from the University of Chicago found that only a quarter of Japanese are satisfied with their sex lives, which puts them last on the list. With such data, how do we explain the fact that Japan uses love hotels more than 500 million times a year? "We grew up in an environment influenced by erotic culture. Whether it's cartoons or entertainment videos, they all influence our learning of eroticism to some extent," said Matsuyama.

Among most of the Japanese lovers I have met, when talking about love hotels, some people look disdainful, thinking that they are cheap consumption places, while others say that students of the University of Tokyo must not know what love hotels are, but this is not the case. Hao, a fourth-year student at the University of Tokyo, introduced me to love hotels, which are now very rare in Tokyo.

For American photographer Misty Keasler, who has photographed nearly 50 love hotels across Japan over the past 20 years, "When I was photographing a room, I didn't want to pursue what was right or wrong in the room." In her opinion, many of the rooms there make people feel that there is no love. And the more tools and accessories there are in the room, the less love there seems to be. A Hello Kitty room she once photographed. "Hello Kitty is a symbol of Japanese culture and is so cute. It's shocking to see it being used in this way." The Hello Kitty rooms photographed by Misty Keasler are actually a common theme in Japanese love hotels. They truly subverted the image of Hello Kitty. Unfortunately, such subversion no longer exists.

But the designers of Japanese love hotels may not agree with Misty Keasle's view that there is no love. David, a designer who has designed many love hotels in Osaka, said: "Although a love hotel only has a dozen to twenty rooms, the competition among these love hotels is very fierce." The managers of each hotel require designers to create illusions and idols of sex so that customers can continue to come in. "This is a place for everyone to have fun. We use our minds to stimulate sex, so things like props and atmosphere become very important." But David also admitted that due to the Japanese government's management of love hotels and restrictions on business license categories, fewer and fewer hotels are asking them to design theme rooms. For those special love hotels that were once all the rage, a large number of them have now become silent. You can only browse their information in expired articles on the Internet, and no one will know where they were.

Love hotels are always changing, and not always for the good. They are becoming more and more advanced, slowly making people forget their original image, and the decoration industry is becoming more and more tasteful, but the bad news is that those delightful theme rooms that were once popular are gradually disappearing from sight. Although they still exist, it’s increasingly difficult to find rooms with bumper cars or disco lights.