The Akasaka Love Hotel

Update: Sadly this has been demolished.

In Japan ‘Love Hotels’ are a lot like roadside motels, designed with the express purpose of facilitating ‘relations’ between Japanese couples who still live at home, and have no access to a bedroom away from their parents. They are often cheap, and come in a variety of wacky ‘flavors,’ decorated in garish hues, with flashing lights, hot tubs, and handy vending machines stocking contraceptives and other toys. You can take a ‘REST’ at a love hotel – one hour, a cheap rate – or enjoy a full STAY which is up to eight hours and more expensive.

The Akasaka Love Hotel Haikyo (Haikyo is a Japanese term that means ‘ruin’) in Tokyo reminds us of the importance of that old adage: ‘location location location.’ Situated at the far end of a strip of Love Hotels on the Lake Tama ring road, it’s clear this place suffered for lack of passing traffic.

Now its forecourt and parking lot are bouldered with rotten 80’s styled furniture, burnt-out cars, and avalanches of mounded pillows. Inside, its gaudy rooms still sing of forbidden pleasures, the walls plastered with bright helios, lurking cheetahs, and naked Bathshebas. It looks unlikely that any lusty couples have joined in their bawdy chorus for quite some time.

Written by Japanese Haikyo expert and explorer Michael John Grist. More about this place and other Haikyo can be found on his site here.