On Tuesday Japan's love hotels will be full of young people celebrating St Valentine's Day. David McNeill walks the streets to trace the evolution of these often outrageous, sometimes seedy and quintessentially Japanese institutions.
The night has gone well. The meal was delicious, the drinks went down like nectar and the talk was smooth. Fergal looked sharp as a tack, Moira glowed like a moonlit beach and, when they slithered across the boards of the dance floor, they were like two pieces of a well-oiled machine. Now they sit in the car, basking in the heat of love in a confined space, wondering: what next? It's a problem as old as Cupid's grandmother.
In Ireland the pursuit of love has given most of us a tale to tell: furtive midnight excursions across creaking floors, the hunt for an empty room in a party full of drunks, limb-tied gymnastics in the back of a car. Floors, sofas, even dewy fields have been pressed into the service of Eros over the years. Japan has developed a much more civilized solution: the love hotel.
The premise is simple: provide cheap, 24-hour venues for making love in a country where space is at a premium and where most young people still live with their parents in houses with paper-thin walls. Privacy is prized: there is no register book, so no need for aliases, and even in the dwindling number of hotels with flesh-and-blood receptionists, a curtain screens their faces from bashful clients. Inside, every square metre of the hotel is designed to cater to the raging libido.
The hotels began to develop from inns known as tsurekomi, or "bring your own partner", after the second World War. Today more than 30,000 are dotted all over a country with little appetite for the puritanical; a 2004 estimate by an industry watcher, Vitamin Miura, claimed that more than a million people visit Japanese love hotels every day, supporting a multibillion-dollar industry.
Garish and instantly recognisable in Japan's grey concrete landscapes, the hotels blow giant neon raspberries at the prudish foreigner. They have become as much a part of the country as karaoke boxes and bullet trains. Many are monuments to kitsch, with primary-colour facades, fur-lined corridors and rooms themed to 1960s music, Hollywood stars, UFOs, dodgems, S&M and prison cells. Some fronts resemble churches, Egyptian temples or Roman coliseums, watched over by King Kong, ET or the Statue of Liberty and basking in names such as Pink Oasis, Gay Paris and Little Chapel Christmas.
Every evening you can spot couples wandering the love-hotel areas of Tokyo, Osaka and other big cities, shyly discussing where to go. "We're not that fussy, as long as it is clean and inexpensive," says Taka, a university student who was shopping for a hotel on a recent Friday night in Shibuya's famous Dogenzaka love-hotel district. His girlfriend, Kanako, wants something cute, because she's going to photograph the room with her mobile phone. "I'd like to keep it as a memento," she giggles. "I compare rooms with my friends."
Ayumi Fujii, a 19-year-old clerk for a construction company, says: "I go to love hotels because there's nowhere else to have sex. I live with my mother, father and older sister, and the house is small, so there is no way anything is going to happen there. I like a local hotel called Shine, because it is clean and they have heated carpets, a TV in the bath and a big-screen TV in the bedroom. I like to go on my birthday and at Christmas. If I'm dating somebody I go about 10 times a month." He always pays. "I'm not into guys who are broke all the time."
Like Taka, Kanako and Ayumi, most love-hotel customers are in their teens or 20s, but there is a good sprinkling of middle-aged lovebirds, and much older folk are frequently drawn to their attractions, too. "We quite often have people in their 70s here," says Hiroshi Yoshitomi, who manages Le Château, in Kanagawa prefecture, west of Tokyo. "You never know who is going to turn up these days, because there are more and more divorced couples and healthier older people."
Once fairly seedy establishments catering mainly to prostitutes and their clients, including US soldiers during the occupation of 1945-51, love hotels gradually cleaned up their act. In the 1960s and 1970s - often considered their tacky heyday - owners threw everything into attracting Japan's growing urban population. A three-hour stay in a room with a vibrating bed, velvet walls and disco lights was for millions of Japanese the first step to marriage and children, sometimes in the wrong order.
A 1985 law attempted to segregate hotels into "sex-related' - typically short stays - and "lodging", forcing many unlicensed establishments to throw out the chains, mirrors and revolving beds that gave them much of their kitsch flavour. And with Japan's increasingly emancipated women more likely to share the cost of a room, many hotels have also ditched the testosterone-heavy themes - cowboys, aliens, racing cars and the like - that made them as much fun for some women as a visit to the dentist.
These days women typically shop for hotels before a date, online or in one of several glossy magazines that cater to the trade. The growing female clientele means the term "love hotel" is fading, replaced by the nicer-sounding "fashion" and "boutique" establishments, with fake art, cuddly toys and French decor. The evolution has led to much confusion for tourists, but the short-stay option, advertised in neon signs outside along with prices per stay, remains a dead giveaway.
In some areas you can still find pleasingly bizarre family-owned hotels with a seen-it-all pensioner behind the counter, taking money and handing out keys. But Le Château is fairly typical of the plush establishments many love hotels have become as they have changed, merged and attracted foreign money and more paying women customers. With everything from parking to room hire fully automated, the staff are not visible. Cars are screened from the road by a barrier and, just in case, the hotel provides plastic shields to cover registration plates.
Every soundproofed room, selected outside from an electronic panel with photographs, is equipped with a television (including 24-hour adult movies), DVD, bath and sex-toy dispenser. Another control panel dims and changes the colour of lights and selects music. At the end of a three-hour tryst the customers put 7,000-8,000 yen (€50-€55) into a machine that resembles a parking meter and head back to mum and dad's place. Hotels in other parts of the country often charge for shorter stays, of between one and two hours, leading to inevitable jokes about the stamina of Tokyo dwellers.
Behind the fur-lined walls, an army of people keeps everything running smoothly. Most rooms in good love hotels are turned over three times a day, which means a mountain of cleaning and washing, often performed by middle-aged women who keep their eyes glued to the carpet. On the busiest days of the year - holidays, St Valentine's Day and Christmas Eve (a huge dating event in the Japanese calendar) - the turnover can double. It is all hugely profitable. "Very few of these hotels lose money," says Yoshitomi. "But you have to achieve an occupancy rate of at least 200 per cent a day, and to do that you must make the customer happy."
That basic philosophy, typified in the Japanese saying Okyaku-sama wa Kami-sama da ("the customer is king"), combined with the country's libertine approach to sex, means that anything goes. There are hotels that cater to the man (and it must surely be a male) who wants to try the latest PlayStation; the couple who must have 50 cable channels and a karaoke machine; and the group of eight who just cannot bear to be apart, even with all their clothes off in a giant Jacuzzi.
The industry has its dark side. Some hotels still cater to newer manifestations of prostitution, such as "delivery health", a euphemism for a dial-a-prostitute service that has swept Japan's sex trade. Takahisa Suenaga, a private investigator with a detective agency called Galu, has spent years working on divorce cases, which take him most weeks to the love-hotel districts of Shibuya and Shinjuku, in central Tokyo. "I once saw a man going into a love hotel with his own daughter. I was tailing the man because his wife thought he was having an affair. I can't tell you how hard it was to tell his wife."
Some believe the industry may have to develop methods, such as identity checking, to deal with such problems, but the trend is towards more, not less, anonymity. In the newest hotels, robot receptionists greet couples in a chirpy female voice, take payments and guide them to their rooms. The bored granny receptionist will one day go the way of the water bed and disco lights.
The new robots typify the technological evolution of the love hotel, some of which now come with 40-inch plasma screens and laser shows. For those who don't get distracted, somewhere among all the clutter is a good old-fashioned bed. "Sometimes I wonder where it will all end," sighs Yoshitomi.
• QUEEN ELIZABETH II, Lake Sagami
What could be more natural? A 50-bedroom love nest shaped like an ocean liner and named after Britain's crusty monarch. From a distance it looks like the giant architectural folly of some mad rich Lothario, ready to plow into the unsuspecting waters of Lake Sagami. It looks no saner up close, and that's before you sample the treats inside, which include nautical sex-themed rooms and a gorilla for a captain.
• ADONIS, Osaka
Hello Kitty and S&M. Japan's favourite cartoon character is given a makeover that will scare children everywhere. If the sight of the bound-and-gagged stuffed cat doesn't get your pulse racing, there's plenty more where that came from in this S&M-themed landmark, set, bizarrely, in one of the city's temple districts. Chain yourself to ceilings, walls and crosses, and, if you're a boring conventionalist, a bed.
• GANG SNOWMAN, Osaka
You've hit it off with the boy or girl of your dreams, had a nice meal and a few drinks, and the night's activities inevitably lead to a rose-strewn road called Pleasures of the Flesh. The journey ends on the top floor of Snowman, where you take a bath inside a Cadillac, have a water-pistol fight, tie each other to the S&M chair provided just in case the action flags, then watch a postcoital movie on a giant snowman-shaped television. Sleep optional.
• PLAZA 1 & PLAZA ART, Tokyo
The famous love hotel district of Shibuya, in central Tokyo, fairly groans with treats for disciples of Eros, but if role-playing pushes your buttons, then these establishments are for you. Dress up as a schoolgirl, stewardess, nurse or cop in costumes provided by the management, then take it all off again to bathe in the private pool or cave-shaped hot-springs room, or have a party (up to eight people) in room 902. The more "women-friendly' Plaza Art features ceramic breasts on the corridor walls and a giant butterfly in one of the rooms. You have to get closer before you notice that the butterfly has chains and cuffs attached.