Love Hotel: A new documentary on Japan’s spaces for sexual trysts

We’ve just heard of this new documentary which takes a look at one of our favorite places, the love hotel.

While we don’t like the preview’s slightly cheap pandering to exoticism and stereotypes about Japan (“in a society where conformity is everything and public affection cannot be shown…” — really?) that just aren’t the whole truth, we shouldn’t judge it solely by the trailer.

The visuals are interesting, at any rate, promising some nice kinky scenes of S&M inside a love hotel room, by the looks of things. Check out the nurse asking her “patient” if his cock has a name.

It seems to suggest that love hotels are a dying breed fighting against the economic curve. “Can the love hotel survive?” it asks.

Directed by Philip Cox and Hikaru Toda, it is a UK/France/Japan co-production and has no full release date. Given that it is only just over an hour long, it likely won’t play at major movie theaters.

At present the film’s rather scant imdb.com entry states the synopsis as:

Pensioners, lawyers, married couples and teenagers are all customers at the Angel Love Hotel in Osaka Japan. With unprecedented access into one of the most private and anonymous spaces in Japanese society, this film follows the love hotel’s struggling manager and staff as the try to keep their hotel running, as well as revealing the intimate and private lives of the customers who visit.

Apparently the directors filmed it over two years and had success recruiting participants in Osaka, since the city has a reputation for being full of funny people who like to have a good time. By chance, when they were filming the government tightened up rules about love hotels and this ended up with the love hotel the makers focused on actually having to shut down at the end. Of course, these crackdowns are parallel the political sphere and also similar developments in the nightclub scene in Kansai.

Though the trailer boasts that the love hotel has existed for centuries, in fact scholars think that what we now regard as a physical space rented for sex can be traced to the relatively recent past of the early pre-war years. There were enshuku (“one-yen dwellings”) which were lodgings for couples to share the night, but they were commonly used for prostitutes to host clients.

They then blossomed in the post-war years as Japan’s population was young and growing, and was also starting to demand looser morals for all classes, not just those in power like the past. The enshuku developed into inns called tsurekomi (literally “bring in”). These soon exploded; there were apparently nearly 3,000 in Tokyo by the early 1960’s.

The word “love hotel” then came later in the 1970’s after the middle class had evolved more and so the love hotels too grew from being inns to something more flashy, western, and ambitious… and sometimes this had some bizarre interpretations.

The first to appear under the name “love hotel” was the Meguro Emperor, which opened in 1973 in Meguro in Tokyo. After closing down in the late 1980’s, it reopened in 2007 as a classy establishment and still exists today. On top of being more western inside, it attracted attention for its quasi-European castle design. It was a huge hit and the idea caught on.

Although almost every time foreigners write about or make a film about love hotels, they focus on the outlandish hotels. In fact, the vast majority of love hotels, for reasons economic and changing fashions and tastes, are today essentially standard hotel rooms, if quite large for a Japanese hotel and with good bathing facilities for couples. If anything, the amenities are the important feature for most. Of course, the exterior of the hotels are always garish and conspicuous, but even then the majority are still fairly ordinary except for the bright lights.