Love Hotels Part I: Rest Or Stay?

There is a list of "Things To Do" when travelling in Japan: visit a few temples, go to a sento (public bath) or onsen (hot springs), eat at a real sushi restaurant, try pachinko (a kind of vertical pinball), get lost in a "tech town" district like Akihabara in Tokyo or Den-Den Town in Osaka...

...And of course, spend a night in a "Love Hotel".

Love hotels are inexpensive but high-quality hotels where rooms can be booked by the hour ("rest") or for the night ("stay"). They are primarily aimed at the young couple in quest of intimacy, and emphasize discretion so as not to embarass their customers. Thus, they are generally located off the main streets, and their entrances and exits are slightly concealed. The only thing you see of the staff is their hands when they take your money. In the parking lots, screens raise to hide the cars number plates. All is made to minimize the risk of meeting an acquaintance by chance... Although, of course, it sometimes happens! There are many stories of people bumping into their regular partner in the hall of a love hotel. I guess it must be funny.

The really surprising thing about love hotels, though, is their sheer number. They can be found everywhere. It is quite interesting, considering that the Japanese are not known for frequent intercourse. According to my friends, the success of love hotels is due to 3 kinds of people:

-Young couples: in Japan, most people live with their parents up until marriage, and it is unthinkable to invite your loved one for a week-end at the family home; so the hotel is the only place to go until marriage. And even if one of the partners has his/her own place, Japanese people are very shy about inviting people to their homes (even people they feel intimate enough with to have sex together), so many starting couples prefer to meet on "neutral ground".

-Older couples: Japanese apartments are famously cramped and poorly soundproofed. So couples with kids or living with elderly parents (a common occurence throughout Asia) rarely feel relaxed enough to make love at home. So they go to a place where they can concentrate on having fun: the love hotel next door, for example.

And then there are the "other couples", or as Lisa Katayama put it in Wired "politician and secretary, teacher and student, husband and hooker"... In Japan, married couples are notoriously uninterested in conjugal sex ("sexless couples" are one of the most common themes in the Japanese media), but it doesn't mean they have no libido... And quite often that libido goes into extra-marital affairs. Anyway, these "other couples" can certainly use the privacy of a love hotel!

To be continued in: Love Hotels Part II, a room for every fantasy!

Wires

One of the common cliches regarding Japanese cities is how futuristic they look. A step into 2030 blah blah... Well we must not be seeing the same cities. While all Japanese cities have some very modern districts, mostly they're just a sprawl of ugly low-rise buildings covered in neon. And as far as I know, neon hasn't looked futuristic in at least 25 years.

But I digress. The really striking thing about Japanese cities is that, as in developing countries, electric wires are not buried but just hung up above the streets. So when you're walking the city, it's always with a mess of electric wires overhead. It takes some time getting used to but for Japanese people, it is such an habitual sight that when you ask them why they don't bury the wires, they just look at you with a blank stare that says, "but what for??".

It is quite paradoxical, considering how much Japanese people love and admire European cities, that they don't see the point in making their own cities beautiful. The Japanese approach to architecture seems to be mostly utilitarian: build fast, cheap, and functional. It used to puzzle me to no end: the Japanese are design addicts who love quality products with a perfect finish and have an obsession for detail, so why don't they mind living in ugly cities where electric wires loom over the streets?

That paradox has a name: it's the "uchi and soto" paradigm. "Uchi" means "my house", "at home", or sometimes "I". "Soto" is "outside, exterior". The Japanese feel uchi when they are with members of their group, in a familiar environment, or in places where they can relax; they feel soto in any other setting: with strangers, in open public places, or anytime they can't be themselves. According to this paradigm, being in a uchi or soto setting conditions the whole behaviour of Japanese people as well as how they feel about their surroundings. In an uchi setting, they are warm-hearted, relaxed, and enjoy life. In a soto setting, they "don the armor": they are distant and inexpressive, never let their guard down, and enjoying life is the furthest thing from their mind.

So for example, if a Japanese has lunch with a new business acquaintance, they will stay very formal, ask few questions, and barely enjoy the food. Talk about awkward! But on the other hand, friends having lunch together generally laugh and giggle with less reserve than you'd find in the West. They don't look inscrutable then!

So, next time the Japanese puzzle you, the uchi and soto paradigm might help you make sense of their behaviour. In the meantime, just a quick disclaimer: Japan has some amazing architects, and when the Japanese bother to try and make a part of the city look nice, it looks really great. Too bad it doesn't happen very often... The ugly wires are here to stay.