Abandoned Kansai

Love hotels always fascinated me. From the first time I heard about them and even more so after the first time I visited one. So of course an abandoned love hotel was always quite high on my “Places I want to go to” list, but while Kanto is swamped with that type of haikyo there seem to be barely any in Kansai. It took me more than a year to find the love hotel Gion, and technically I guess it’s more like a love motel…
Since I guess not everybody reading this blog is familiar with that kind of “popular Japanese subculture”. So, what is a love hotel? First of all – the love hotel industry is not a subculture at all, it’s one of the biggest money makers in Japan! A love hotel (also known as fashion hotel, amusement hotel, boutique hotel, couples hotel, romance hotel or leisure hotel) is a hotel where you can get rooms not only for a whole night, but also by the hour. They originated in the Edo period in Edo (nowadays Tokyo) and Kyoto, the then-capital – appearing to be tea rooms or normal inns, used by both prostitutes and normal couples. When prostitution was abolished in 1958 love hotels (then known as “bring-along inns”) started to boom – litte known fact: Even Nintendo ran a love hotel in 1963, just about 10 years before they started entering and revolutionizing the video games industry. The modern term “love hotel” derives from the “Hotel Love”, which was built in 1968 and attracted customers with a rotating sign. While some love hotels are basically more or less normal hotels without windows (if you see a hotel without windows in Japan you can be sure it’s a love hotel…) and an extremely discrete front desk other love hotels have very creative theme rooms for almost every taste – from princess bedrooms to BDSM stuff, from train compartments to whatever cliché fantasy you can imagine. The furnishing and equipment of those rooms vary heavily on the price – in addition to the standard stuff you have in a normal hotel room (TV, free tea, hairdryer, …) you usually get a games console, a karaoke machine and some condoms; some hotels have vending machines with sex toys in the hallway or the lobby. If you are willing to pay more there are basically no limits – insanely huge HDTVs, jacuzzis, massage chairs, private balconies on the top floor to enjoy the night sky and in some cases even a private swimming pool. While “rests” are about 2000 to 4000 Yen an hour “stays” cost about 8000 to 16000 Yen per room per night (usually from 10 or 11 p.m. on for 10 or 12 hours, depending on the hotel) – super luxurious rooms can cost up to 60.000 Yen per night in cities like Kyoto or Tokyo. (1000 Yen = 9 Euros / 13 US-$)
Nowadays the turnover of the love hotel industry in Japan is a whopping 4 trillion Yen per year, equivalent to about 36,000,000,000 Euros or 52,000,000,000 US-$ as of September 2011 – generated by 500 million visits to 37,000 love hotels all over the country. Love hotels are considered a whacky underground thing by many foreigners, while in fact they are part of daily life, turning over double of what the anime industry does.
Why are love hotels so successful in Japan? Because Japanese walls are thin and a lot of even not so young Japanese people are still living with their parents; the so-called parasite singles (パラサイトシングル, parasaito shinguru) enjoy the carefree and comfortable life of living at home up till their early 30s when even the late bloomers are getting married. If they want to have some passionate hours with their girlfriends, boyfriends or club acquaintances they go to a love hotel (and so do most adulterers…). It’s clean, it’s anonymous (most lovel hotel visitors don’t see any staff person!) and it’s affordable, especially if you have a job and still live with your parents. And the novelty factor of the rooms is a big plus, too!
So one day in November I met up with Damon and Andrew at a small train station somewhere in Shiga – all three of us were eager to finally explore an abandoned love hotel; especially Damon, who seems to find secret porn stashes at pretty much every location he goes to. Sadly the haikyo Love Hotel Gion didn’t have any of the (fake) glamour and sexiness you experience at a fashion hotel that’s still in business. It wasn’t even a real hotel, more like a motel – 8 row bungalows with rather deep open garages in front of them to prohibit people from getting an easy look at the license plates of the parked cars. The lot in front was quite big, so I guess another row bungalow or two were already demolished. And the one still standing was in pretty bad shape overall. Some of the “rooms” I didn’t fully explore, because the floors and roofs were falling apart, but one or two were barely touched. The downside of that was that it was pitch-black in there – luckily I brought my tripod. The layout of the bungalow sections was pretty much the same for all of them. A little lobby at the entrance, a windowless bath including a tiled tub to the left and then a bedroom straight ahead. Most of the bedrooms were covered by landscape wallpapers while the rest of the rooms had crimson wallpapers. Very, very 70s porn! (Or how an innocent young man like myself imagines something filthy like that!) Sadly most of the rooms were empty except for fixtures and solid bed frames. In one of the mini apartments we found a jukebox in questionable condition, but the most interesting detail was the wall mosaic in one of the bathrooms – it depicted two nude women in front of a horse, of one of them you could see the pubic area. Shaved, with just a little bit of hair left; except for the final stone – that one was red…
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