While some properties have been totally gutted others have undergone less thorough transformation processes as a result, if your budget hotel has a larger bathroom than the usual cramped shower/bath/toilet combo than it probably used to be a love hotel. In reality, many former love hotels have been converted into normal hotels - especially since the pre-COVID uptick in foreign tourists. Still, it’s been estimated that over a million couples visit love hotels every day. There are maybe around 10,000 love hotels in Japan today (accounts vary wildly), which is a far cry from the 30,000 or so that existed during their golden age in the 1980s. You’ll typically find rabuho near stations, in somewhat out-of-the-way areas in suburbia or industria, or near highways. In keeping with the on-the-DL protocol, some love hotels even have separate entrances and exits so that you and your honey can arrive and leave without being too conspicuous. Police scrutiny from the later 1970s onward pushed the more flamboyant features of love hotels indoors, and most newer ones have fairly nondescript exteriors that sort of blend into the Tokyo streets. We’re looking at you, Meguro Emperor in Meguro, Hotel Zebra in Ikebukuro, and Hotel UFO in Chiba).Īre you feeling lovery today? | Photo by Gregory Lane
(A lot of the flamboyant love hotel architecture does survive, though.
Swings and vibrating beds were already part of the schtick, as were the themed rooms and frankly bonkers architecture characteristic of many older rabuho. Increasing car ownership in the 1960s made the concept of motels more familiar, and the first Japanese love hotels on the edges of highways sprang up during that decade. At the time, Japanese homes were usually designed with sleeping areas doubling as living areas during the day and, as a result, not much scope for afternoon delight - and even less so if you had kids or live-in in-laws. Although the concept of having a hotel specifically for the purposes of, well, sex goes all the way back to the Edo period, the first love hotels as we now know them started up in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
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